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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Pretty nice specs for a handheld battery powered device...

  Processor AMD APU
    CPU: 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

  RAM 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM (5500 MT/s)

  Storage
    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)
    All models include high-speed microSD card slot

Though it does weigh 669 grams (~1.5lbs).

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech

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Desktop: KDE Plasma

KDE Plasma visible in this video of a docked SteamDeck:

https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/vide...

It runs Arch btw

Im not sure how apples to oranges it is, but a GTX 980 (Released in 2014) has 5 TFlops. Genuinely curious how powerful this might be for GPU intensive games. (Call of Duty, Rust, etc..)

Maybe this is equivalent to something like a MX-150 or GTX1050?

Should be totally fine for Valves games though (CSGO, TF2, Etc..)

Switch is 390ish-500 GFlops (higher is when docked)

It’s about perf/watts

but the switch's graphics are terrible

The Switch is actually pretty formidable for 2017 hardware.

Did you see Fast RMX? https://www.nintendo.de/Spiele/Nintendo-Switch-Download-Soft... - that game looks impressive and was a showcase on launch of what the Switch hardware can do.

We have vastly different definitions of what "impressive" means - TW3 was already two years old in 2017 ; the screenshot of the games you linked looks barely like a good PC indie with a metric ton of post-processing FX to hide the textures' low resolution

This is a racing game, screenshots are the wrong medium. Watch the trailer, or look at it in motion on the real console. Also, the screenshots really do suck.

> with a metric ton of post-processing FX to hide the textures' low resolution

That doesn't matter at all to me if the result looks good. Of course it cheats. Many switch games (mostly?) don't even use anti-aliasing. And here is a fast racing game, 1080p@60, with a bunch of effects that manages to look good. The "ton of post-processing FX" is not free. It was important to show what the switch could do on launch, even before developers learn how to optimize for the console.

> That doesn't matter at all to me if the result looks good.

well, lucky you, to me they stick out like a sore thumb ; likewise with the weird lightning on the plants around the tracks. Likewise when looking at this video https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1418 I can't help but have my eyes linger on the super static blue / orange exhaust at the back of the vehicle, be angered at the very cheap splish splash here: https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1445 or the smoke sprites suddenly disappearing here https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1495 ; it'd definitely break my immersion while playing and make it an unenjoyable experience. And don't get me started on the aliasing...

Having a screen resolution of only 1280x800 helps a lot. Steam Deck specs say up to 1.6 TFlops from the GPU.

That's half as many pixels as the 1080p screens that people in 2014 were playing on. Keeping "rendering quality" fixed, pixels and flops aren't necessarily linearly correlated, but half the pixels does mean approximately half the flops to hit the same quality targets, ignoring the new upscaling tech that will almost certainly be used to close the gap. So 1.6 TFlops today vs. approximately 2.5-equivalent 2014 TFlops is probably not that dramatic of a gap.

And running on a battery. That's actually really damn impressive.

~ GTX 750 Ti, ~800p@30fps gaming.

It also allows developers to target and optimize performance for this specific device (or family of devices). Won't be surprised to see games having a Steam Deck "mode" in the future.

Missing detail information to properly estimate it. But for now, as a lower bound I would look at the 3200G. That one had 8 CUs @ 1,25 GHz, but with Vega architecture, so two architecture steps behind. In my meta benchmark that put the 3200G igpu behind the GeForce GT 1030 [0], but with certainly playable FPS on many games, especially on 720p.

With the new architecture the APU in this machine should be faster (despite the low TDP?), and isn't it combined with really fast ram? If it beats the GTX 750 Ti then that makes a lot of games available on the target resolution, and maybe that's too low a target and your GTX 1050 comparison is apt. The 128MB cache integrated with RDNA 2 could have the effect it had on the Intel Iris Pro 6200 and give a big performance boost in some scenarios, that graphics hardware was awfully strong for an old igpu. Something like that on newer hardware could be really nice and make this a lot stronger than one would expect at first.

[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/gpu/compare?ids%...

Its a 15W APU, ~5300G at 1/4 the power. Full TDP Desktop AMD Ryzen 5700G, The "Fastest Integrated Graphics Ever" 13 days ago https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-7-5700g-review , reaches GTX760 parity in some games like Witcher3, while in others like Overwatch its medium for APU while dedicated gpu runs same framerate at Ultra. So forget 1050, its more like 750TI.

The igpu of the 5700G is not based on the RDNA 2 architecture, it is based on the older Vega architecture. It's no step up (in that compartment) than the very first Ryzen APUs, the 2200G. The 5000G series was a big disappointment in my eyes because of that.

But you are right in saying that a 15W APU can't be expected to be very fast.

I was thinking AMD Renoir but Zen 2 and RDNA 2 is an odd combination. Is it custom?

Yeah, probably. Kinda like a Xbox Series/PS5 CPU lite.

>> I was thinking AMD Renoir but Zen 2 and RDNA 2 is an odd combination. Is it custom?

I don't recall any APU with that combination. The 5700G which is due next month is Zen 3 with Vega graphics.

Personally I don't care much about RDNA 2 but I would like the hardware AV1 decoder.

> We partnered with AMD to create Steam Deck's custom APU, optimized for handheld gaming.

From the hardware section on the website.

This seems like the rumored AMD Van Gogh for low power configurations: Zen2 CPU + Navi2 GPU. Essentially it's AMD's stop-gap solution before the launch of Rembrandt (Zen3 + Navi2). https://www.tweaktown.com/news/78815/amd-van-gogh-apus-zen-2...

Also agreed that this looks very price competitive. Given storage is SSD-expandable, $399 gives you a fairly powerful mobile gaming platform and PC.

SSD is soldered in

I've heard it is then later I heard it's actually expandable somehow. So who knows.

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