When it launched in 2022, the Steam Deck opened up portable gaming to a new level that the Sony PS Vita and Nintendo Switch couldn’t reach before, thanks in large part to the Steam Store’s Babylonian library of titles. It was a good deal for its time, even though Valve launched a massive price hike on the Steam Deck earlier this year in the wake of rising component prices caused by AI permeating the tech industry and beyond. That said, whether you have an LCD or OLED Steam Deck, you get performance that can keep up with a Switch 2 while still maintaining the overall flexibility of a PC.
The Steam Deck runs on an AMD accelerated processor unit (APU) custom-designed for the machine, and its integrated GPU was built on the same RDNA architecture as the Radeon 660M and 680M, both also from 2022. You may be wondering how the Steam Deck’s GPU compares to other AMD graphics cards: on paper, it’s specced right between the 660M and 680M and performs accordingly in benchmarks. But if you’re looking for closer equivalents, 3DMark’s benchmark results suggest you’d find its AMD GPU equivalent in an entry-level desktop Radeon RX 550 from 2017 or a laptop Radeon RX 560X from 2018. That said, benchmark tests don’t tell the whole story here.
The Steam Deck GPU works well for its intended purpose
Stepan Skorobogadko/Shutterstock
Before you start muttering about how your old gaming laptop is better than the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, there are a few things to keep in mind. The first is the nature of APUs. AMD pioneered the design of APUs as a way to increase power for a given power, which is crucial in mobile products where battery efficiency is valuable. The Steam Deck’s GPU resides on the same chip as the CPU and shares with it 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory on a power budget of between 4 and 15 watts. On laptops, discrete GPUs consume up to 30, 40, and even 50 watts and draw from a small pool of dedicated, ultra-fast GDDR memory.
It’s understandably difficult to get individual comparisons in a game with so many hardware and software contingencies at play. We looked at Cyberpunk 2077 frames played on the Steam Deck APU as well as a Radeon RX 550 tied to a Ryzen 5 5500 – with roughly the same settings, of course – and found that while the Steam Deck averaged 40-50fps with the With Intel XeSS 2.0 scaling enabled, the RX 550 starts in this range without scaling, up to the 60s with AMD’s FSR. Technology 3.0. Make no mistake: the Steam Deck offers a decent gaming experience here, especially on its built-in 1280×800 display, and you may be able to get good 1080p output on some lightweight titles when connected to an external display. But as always, your mileage may vary.
On pure silicon, the Steam Deck was outperformed by Asus and Lenovo with their respective ROG Ally and Legion Go handhelds. These newer entries come with more powerful AMD Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme chipsets, as well as newer Radeon 780M integrated graphics and a thermal design power (TDP) range of 9 to 30 watts. That said, putting aside the gap in raw specs, there’s still reasonable room for debate over what kind of gaming handheld on the market you should really buy.
