Steam Deck’s Chip Is All About Consistency
Performance over raw power.
You Are Reading :Steam Decks Chip Is All About Consistency
We’ve already seen the insides of a Steam Deck courtesy of a teardown video a few months ago, but now we’re learning more about just what powers Valve’s upcoming handheld PC.
This comes courtesy of the recent Steamworks Virtual Conference, a series of several videos that dive deep into just what makes the Steam Deck tick. Topics ranged from how Steam operates on the Deck to how Valve made Proton the Linux distribution for gaming around. There was also a deep dive into the new AMD-sourced APU, which apparently is being made for consistency over raw power.
The chip is called Aerith SoC, and yes, it’s a reference to the Final Fantasy 7 character. It’s a four-core, eight-thread APU derived from AMD’s latest Zen 3 microarchitecture (that’s the same stuff that powers the current generation of Ryzen processors and also powers both the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S).
Paired to the Aerith APU are eight RDNA 2 compute units, which also use the same architecture as AMD’s current line of Radeon GPUs and also can be found in the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. You’ll see AMD show up a lot with modern game consoles.
AMD and Valve worked closely together to ensure that its hardware would work well with Proton. They also worked to ensure all those chips are consistent rather than ultra-powerful. Clock speeds are less important than power consumption given that the Deck is a handheld, battery-powered device. The Deck’s 40-watt battery should provide up to eight hours of game time, and devs are encouraged to optimize their games for battery life by implementing a frame cap.
Since the conference is intended for developers, each video has a bunch of suggestions for game devs to optimize their games for the Deck. One such feature is to use textures specifically optimized for the Deck’s hardware. Valve will have a verification system in place to let gamers know if developers have tried to optimize their titles for the Deck, so this sort of thing is going to be important for performance.
Sadly, we’ll have to wait at least a few more months before we see the Deck in action. Valve recently announced a two-month delay on the first Deck deliveries thanks to global supply issues. Seems to be the same story everywhere when it comes to hardware these days.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/steam-decks-chip-consistency/