All of sudden, Valve unveiled its Steam Deck as one of the most interesting and portable gaming devices in recent times. It’s an exciting piece of hardware that will allow you to take your Steam games anywhere and play them while on the go. A few select users around the world have gotten a first look at it. Studios have begun receiving dev kits for the Steam Deck and were starting to see the first benchmark tests popping out. The latest piece comes from Ranger, who performed tests across different games on different settings to see whether the device can hold its own.
These benchmark tests ran on a Steam Deck dev kit. So the performance can be slightly different in the retail version of the device. In some cases, we even get better and more optimized performance. For those unaware, the Steam Deck boasts a custom AMD APU. It utilizes the Zen 2 and RDNA 2 and brings them to a single chip.
The Steam Deck provides steady 45 – 60 FPS gaming depending on the graphics settings
According to Tom’s Hardware, the testing was done across 4 different games. These titles are Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Doom, Cyberpunk 2077, and DOTA 2. The test involved running the game in different settings (High-Low-Custom) to see whether the Steam Deck manages to hit high framerates.
Setting Shadow of the Tomb Raiders graphics preset to the highest quality resulting in a pretty steady 36 FPS. Worth noting that this is already better than most of the last-gen consoles. Bringing the preset down by a little, the framerate immediately shot up to somewhere north of 60 FPS. The testing suggests that there was hardly any stuttering while using the highest available graphics preset at @30 FPS.
Bethesda’s DOOM yields similar results with frame rates floating around 60 FPS at medium settings. However, doing some changes to the present to improve the graphics, brought it down to 46 FPS which is still amazing. After all, it’s a portable “console” running an AAA title. Since these demanding games were successful, DOTA 2 performance was more than incredible with steady 80 FPS at low and a respectable 47 FPS at the highest.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most interesting games tested on the Steam Deck. The game is known for the multitude of issues it has in the last-gen consoles due to its hardware. On the highest settings preset, the Steam Deck ran the game between 20 and 30 frames per second. The experience was according to the testing, quite smooth.
Battery life may be a problem
Worth noting that the temperature of the console was around 42.6 °C, while the grips were around 29°C. Unfortunately, the battery seems to not be held in long gaming sessions. The capacity dropped from 100% to 46% after just 3 hours of gameplay. This is, of course, still a dev kit and not the final retail version, which means there will be certain optimizations made to the device before launch in December 2021. Of course, using quick math, the device would hold for at least 5 hours and 30 minutes of gaming.
