Steam Deck game console that is powered by AMD processor and will offer gamers stable gaming performance.

Valve made its broadcast, giving detailed information about the Steam Deck portable game console. The company also shared more information about AMD's custom SoC to power the console.

So far, we've talked about Van Gogh APUs, where the chipmaker will combine Zen 2 cores with RDNA 2 graphics. While some may expect an APU with Zen 3 architecture, this configuration won't become reality until 2022, when the Ryzen 6000G Rembrandt debuts. The 7nm SoC has always been known by the name Van Gogh, but the SKU that Valve uses on the Steam Deck is codenamed "Aerith". This introduced SoC was developed exclusively for Deck by AMD with Zen 2 cores.

Aerith utilizes four cores and eight threads with clock speeds between 2.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz. Instead of shooting with high-speed clocks on live, Valve preferred more consistent frequencies. Despite the low clock speeds, the new chip offers the highest FP32 (single precision) performance up to 448 GFLOPs. This isn't the best way to benchmark a processor in games, but Valve has only provided this data. For comparison, Aerith runs slightly slower than the Ryzen 3 Pro 4450U (473.6 GFLOPs), a quad-core and eight-thread Zen 2 chip.

While the Aerith APU has a TDP ranging from 4W to 15W, Valve also confirmed that it does not impose hard thermal limits. Instead, framerate limiters are requested from game developers. The company will implement a framerate limiter in the near future if the developers don't use it in their games.

The main reason why the manufacturer does not leave Aerith thermally constrained is to ensure that the device offers the same performance regardless of the mode it is running in. In certain scenarios, such as playing games outside on a hot day, the device's charge rates, download speeds, or SSD bandwidth can be limited to maintain Steam Deck GPU performance.

On the graphics side, there are eight RDNA 2 compute units (CUs) accompanying the four Zen 2 cores. CUs are clocked between 1 GHz and 1.6 GHz. As you know, this architecture is used in AMD's latest Radeon graphics cards with features such as FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and DirectX 12 Ultimate. The RDNA 2 unit offers up to 1.6 TFLOPs of FP32 performance on paper and is comparable to the GeForce MX450 (1.67 TFLOP). However, as we mentioned, the raw performance figures are not always accurate, as Steam Deck is said to reach 60 FPS in many modern games.

Valve bundled the Aerith APU with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and 1GB of VRAM. Aerith was the first AMD mobile processor to take advantage of LPDDR5 memory. According to Valve, modern games work just fine with 8GB or 12GB of memory, so the 16GB capacity makes the Steam Deck future-proof. Also, since AMD's APUs love bandwidth, LPDDR5 memory is a great choice. LPDDR5 will offer high bandwidth of up to 88 GBps on Valve's upcoming gaming handheld, and Steam Deck has no problem in this regard.

An early comparison of the differences between the various storage options available for Steam Deck was also included in the presentation. As you can see in the comparison below, the cheaper 64GB eMMC predictably runs slower and has longer boot times than the 512GB NVMe SSD. However, even eMCC can offer sufficient gaming experience.

Finally, Valve compared the level of performance one can expect from the device on its Steam Deck documentation page for developers to the MinisForum Elite Mini UM700, an available mini PC listed on Amazon for $670.

Steam Deck was originally scheduled to launch in December. However, with the impact of global supply problems, the consoles' release was delayed to February 2022.