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Valve's Steam Deck dev kit got the early benchmark treatment

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Shared on a Chinese news website, one lucky recipient of the Steam Deck developer kit decided to show off some benchmarks although they probably weren't supposed to.

We already knew that the Steam Deck had some pretty impressive internals, and that Valve had said it's "the most powerful gaming handheld in the world" in their YouTube advert. However, we've not really seen any good numbers until now.

Something to remember is that this is a dev kit, and so tweaks are likely to be made before the consumer units go out. Not only that but plenty of developers will no doubt be tweaking their games ahead of time. There will also be multiple updates to the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer before release too for running Windows games on it.

Anyway, here's what they tested and how they ran. Sadly we don't know the exact settings they used in some places so we've mentioned "tweaked" for those:

Game Setting: FPS
Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Highest: 30 FPS
High: 36 FPS
Lower (tweaked): 60FPS

DOOM (2016) Higher (tweaked): 46 FPS
Medium: 60 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 High: 20 - 30 FPS
Dota 2 Highest: 47 FPS
Low: 80 FPS

One concern seems to be how hot it got after playing Cyberpunk. Not a very realistic game to be playing on High settings on the Steam Deck though. The user showed using a digital thermometer the back hit 42.6°C (108.68°F) and the grips stayed around 29°C (84.2°F).

A reminder on some of the specifications:

  • Compute
    • CPU: AMD APU Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
    • GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
    • APU power: 4-15W
    • 16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM (5500 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)
  • Storage (three models)
    • 64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1)
    • 256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
    • 512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
  • Display
    • Resolution: 1280 x 800px (16:10 aspect ratio)
    • Type: Optically bonded IPS LCD for enhanced readability
    • Display size: 7" diagonal touch-screen
    • Brightness: 400 nits typical
    • Refresh rate: 60Hz
    • Ambient light sensor

Can't even begin to explain how excited I am to get my unit through sometime in Q1 2022.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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23 comments
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Arehandoro Sep 30, 2021
Those are pretty impressive numbers. With those thermals, in winter the Deck will also replace a hot cup of tea for some people :P
Shmerl Sep 30, 2021
CDPR are welcome to tweak their Stadia version of CP2077 and make a native release for Steam Deck ;)
Mohandevir Sep 30, 2021
I wonder if they'll add AMD FRS support to Proton and do some upscale to 800p... Did that with Witcher 3 and F1 2021 (900p upscaled to 1080p). It lowered my GPU temps by 10°-15° (probably not going to happen on an APU) while giving me a performance boost with no noticeable visual impacts. In fact, imo, the contrasts looked better and it solved my fan noise issues.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 30 September 2021 at 3:40 pm UTC
CatKiller Sep 30, 2021
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Quoting: MohandevirI wonder if they'll add AMD FRS support to Proton and do some upscale to 800p... Did that with Witcher 3 and F1 2021 (900p upscaled to 1080p). It lowered my GPU temps by 10°-15° (probably not going to happen on an APU) while giving me a performance boost with no noticeable visual impacts. In fact, imo, the contrasts looked better and it solved my fan noise issues.
A more likely use case for FSR than games running on the internal display is to scale up the image when the device is docked and avoid a performance hit.
kokoko3k Sep 30, 2021
QuoteOne concern seems to be how hot it got after playing Cyberpunk. Not a very realistic game to be playing on High settings on the Steam Deck though.
But this is not a Deck+Cyberpunk specific issue.
Every game that will squeeze the squeezable out of the Deck would have that issue.
I can't read chinese, but i think every game in that list exposed the problem (still, 42 is not that much as long as the deck can keep working without throttling and the handles are fine).


Last edited by kokoko3k on 30 September 2021 at 4:13 pm UTC
BielFPs Sep 30, 2021
I think AMD FSR will really shine on this device (and higher resolutions on small screens are placebo) and those results are very good, specially considering that none of those games were optimized by the developers to run on deck (yet).

The only concern now is the battery time, if it lasts for at least 3 hours then it's already a success in my book :)
kokoko3k Sep 30, 2021
OT:
Is there a way to inject FSR in games that do not support it natively, maybe through vkBasalt?


Last edited by kokoko3k on 30 September 2021 at 4:24 pm UTC
CatKiller Sep 30, 2021
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Quoting: kokoko3kOT:
Is there a way to inject FSR in games that do not support it natively, maybe through vkBasalt?
Yes. One of the custom Protons (I think GE?) has it automatically for the part that scales the window size to the display size (FSHack), and gamescope does the same conversion: they've already said that they're interested in having FSR available as a scaling method there. Vulkan-only, I think, and it doesn't work if the game has its own scaling, and it makes the UI blurry if you do it outside of the game.
dxmn Sep 30, 2021
Surprised to see some of these framerates, I was scared we were going to see them capping out at 60 or maybe even 30 in some situations (with "console quality" settings) but it seems like it's definitely chugging something along
Eike Sep 30, 2021
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Quoting: ShmerlCDPR are welcome to tweak their Stadia version of CP2077 and make a native release for Steam Deck ;)

Does anybody have an idea if this could be legit?
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