Steam Deck Developer Unit Benchmarks Leak, Shows 60 FPS is Doable

[TheLostSwede]

Remember those early developer units of the Steam Deck that Valve was shipping out to developers? Well, one of them ended up in the hands of someone in China, who decided to share a few benchmarks on a local forum. Judging by the pictures posted, Valve still has a lot of work to do when it comes to the translation of the UI, but this shouldn't affect anyone using it in English.

The hardware appears to function according to the announced specs, so there were no surprises here, good or bad. Only four games were tested, which consists of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Doom, Cyberpunk 2077 and DOTA 2. Let's just say that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't going to be what you want to play on the Steam Deck, as it was fluctuating between 20 to 30 FPS, although this was at the high quality setting.



The other games were faring much better, with DOTA 2 averaging around 47 FPS at high quality and hitting 80 FPS when set to low quality. DOOM managed around 60 FPS using the medium quality preset, but a higher quality setting dropped this down to 46 FPS. Finally Shadow of the Tomb Raider seemed to run quite well, all things considered, delivering 36 FPS using the built-in benchmarking tool, while tweaking the graphics setting allowed it to hit 60 FPS. It would appear that Valve's 30 FPS target might be set somewhat on the low side, but it obviously depends on how willing people will be when it comes to compromising on image quality. The question is also how much a higher quality setting will matter on a 7-inch display.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Shihab]

Let's just say that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't going to be what you want to play on the Steam Deck, as it was fluctuating between 20 to 30 FPS, although this was at the high quality setting.

If some people play it on previous gen consoles...

 

[alex08101998]

Who care about hight settings on a 7 inch 800p screen
At this kind of pixel density higher graphic have no impact and in fact may induce worse battery life
Don't forget it's first a portable device
For dock mod is different but for me a 400 to 500 device. Don't expect it to play hight settings

 

[TheLostSwede]

If some people play it on previous gen consoles...

The PC port apparently suffers quite a bit when it comes to performance.

 

[Valantar]

It would appear that Valve's 30 FPS target might be set somewhat on the low side,

@TheLostSwede This is a misunderstanding. The 30fps "target" was meant as a minimum expectation - at least 30fps, to ensure playability. Valve has never expected 30fps to be a universal performance target for the Steam Deck. As VG247 quotes the Valve developer who originally made the "30fps target" comment: "30fps in this case "refers to the floor of what we consider playable in our performance testing"".

Heck, I expect far above 60fps in certain titles (Rocket League, anyone?) on this hardware. Ori and the Will of the Wisps ran at ~75fps at 1080p medium on my 4650G HTPC (DDR4-3200, iGPU OC to 2100), and while that has a 65W power target and two more cores, this has a much faster GPU - so 800p should easily exceed 60fps. And, to be clear, Ori at 1080p medium is gorgeous.

 

[Space Lynx]

I'm glad I cancelled my Steam Deck pre-order. Honestly steam has a great idea here, but imo they should waited another APU generation or two, and did the OLED screen like Nintendo is doing.

I was one of the lucky ones and got my Switch OLED preorder in... arrives in about 14 days. Going to be gorgeous playing some of my fav indie games in OLED...

 

[Valantar]

I'm glad I cancelled my Steam Deck pre-order. Honestly steam has a great idea here, but imo they should waited another APU generation or two, and did the OLED screen like Nintendo is doing.

I was one of the lucky ones and got my Switch OLED preorder in... arrives in about 14 days. Going to be gorgeous playing some of my fav indie games in OLED...

I'm hoping someone starts selling screen upgrades for the SD Either a 120Hz IPS or a 60Hz OLED would be quite nice for this. The chances of either existing in the right size and resolution though? Near zero, sadly. I disagree with your judgement on performance though - it seems adequate, and there'll always be something better coming in the future, so at some point you just have to go. LPDDR5+RDNA2 seems like an excellent point to try this out properly, even if 5nm RDNA2/3 with more CUs (and faster LPDDR5?) will obviously be better. That's just how technology works. This still so far seems to deliver good enough performance for what it's meant to do.

 

[Space Lynx]

I'm hoping someone starts selling screen upgrades for the SD Either a 120Hz IPS or a 60Hz OLED would be quite nice for this. The chances of either existing in the right size and resolution though? Near zero, sadly. I disagree with your judgement on performance though - it seems adequate, and there'll always be something better coming in the future, so at some point you just have to go. LPDDR5+RDNA2 seems like an excellent point to try this out properly, even if 5nm RDNA2/3 with more CUs (and faster LPDDR5?) will obviously be better. That's just how technology works. This still so far seems to deliver good enough performance for what it's meant to do.

with the chip shortages, I expect TSMC has the steam deck chips pretty low on the totem pole honestly. I really bet we only get like 30% of pre-orders filled by end of 2022. so meh. this like many things is already DOA due to the shortages.

 

[Valantar]

with the chip shortages, I expect TSMC has the steam deck chips pretty low on the totem pole honestly. I really bet we only get like 30% of pre-orders filled by end of 2022. so meh. this like many things is already DOA due to the shortages.

That might be, but given that Valve went to the length of making a semi-custom chip, my guess is that AMD has a sufficient amount of wafers set aside for them. Shouldn't be that many. If we assume a similar die size to Renoir and plug that into a wafer yield calculator, assuming TSMC's 7nm yields haven't improved at all since they hit 0.09/mm2 several years ago (which they likely have), we get 336 error-free dice per wafer (assuming none of those with errors are usable, which they likely will be). That means 298 wafers for 100 000 Steam Decks, 2976 wafers for a million, etc. That's not that much, all things considered, especially as many actors are moving to 5nm already. Of course there could be shortages of other stuff, but ... meh. They'll likely get by. Valve has tons of cash to throw around after all. It's not like they've spent any on game development in the past decade

 

[TheLostSwede]

with the chip shortages, I expect TSMC has the steam deck chips pretty low on the totem pole honestly. I really bet we only get like 30% of pre-orders filled by end of 2022. so meh. this like many things is already DOA due to the shortages.

Sorry, but what does TSMC have to do with it? They have a contract with a company, in this case AMD, for an agreed upon amount of wafers per month, per node. What their customers make in terms of product SKUs, has nothing to do with TSMC, as it's entirely up to their customers. As such, it comes down to what agreement AMD has with Valve, much like it comes down to what agreement AMD has with Microsoft and Sony.

 

[Patr!ck]

So pretty much what I expected a few months ago. Now I even tend to believe that a GPD Win 3 or One XPlayer at 25-28W is on par or slightly faster than a Steam Deck at 15W (while having user replaceable SSD and external GPU support). The reason why Valve is encouraging other manufacturers to produce their own is because they know the availability of the SD won't be better than current Sony and Microsoft consoles.

 

[Fouquin]

IPhone 14 will destroy this in performance

At no point in the history of ever on God's green Earth was the Steam Deck going to be comparing to an iPhone.

For the purest fact that the Steam Deck isn't a phone.

 

[Richards]

At no point in the history of ever on God's green Earth was the Steam Deck going to be comparing to an iPhone.

For the purest fact that the Steam Deck isn't a phone.

Its still gonna be embarrassed

 

[Fouquin]

Its still gonna be embarrassed

Pro Candy Crush and Raid Shadow Legends players will be there to lay down the shade about how great their phone is compared to a handheld PC that can play full PC games, I'm sure. There's no overlap here so I'm really not sure what your point is. You can't even argue Fortnite is the overlap because as of last week, it was banned from the app store permanently.

 

[Valantar]

IPhone 14 will destroy this in performance

Destroy? Meh. Unlikely. Might it be more powerful? Sure. Though it's pretty hard to tell, as cross-platform comparisons are difficult, especially as the same benchmarks tend not to be run on phones and laptops. Sadly there aren't any Ryzen 4000 or 5000 listings in GFXBench's database, but the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro beat out the Ryzen 5 2400G by a bit - 26.7/27.4 fps at sustainable power draws vs. 23.9 for the 2400G (sadly direct links to the GFXBench database don't seem to work). That's a 12/14% lead at much lower power (3.8-3.9W for the iPhones vs. likely ~15W for the 2400G) though there are plenty of unknonws, like the RAM config for the tested laptops, background software, etc. Also, the iPhone here has a massive process node advantage, being TSMC 5nm vs. the GloFo 12nm of the 2400G. Going by the GFXBench database one might think the iPhone 13 is much faster, but as Anandtech showed (previous link), iPhones throttle heavily, and peak GPU performance is far higher than steady-state, thus those numbers are quite misleading.

In 3DMark Wild Life, UL's own testing gives the 12 Pro a score of 7716 (and a stability of 75%, meaning it throttles significantly, though no word on if the score is steady-state or at peak boost). I can only find a single score in 3DMark's database for a 5700U (and no other 4- or 5000-series u-series mobile APUs), which places it at 6714 in some unnamed Lenovo laptop, with an otherwise unknown configuration except for a 15W TDP. Whether this is DDR4 or LPDDR4X and at what speed is an unknown that can significantly skew results, plus the 5nm vs. 7nm advantage. So that's a potential 15% lead.

Though, of course, all of this is with Vega, not RDNA - and we know RDNA delivers a significant "IPC" (for lack of a better term) or performance/CU/clock speed boost compared to Vega. RDNA2 improves on this again. So how will an 8CU RDNA2-equipped APU with LPDDR5 at 15W perform? No idea. Might the iPhone 14 - which won't be out for a full year - be faster? Sure. Will it "destroy" it? No. If a 15% advantage is "destroying" something, then ... your scales are off. Remember, generational improvements in GPUs are shrinking every generation. Look at the perf/W table in the Anandtech article - the A13 is 35% faster than the A12 at steady-state, while the A14 is just 6% faster than the A13.

And besides, who cares? The cheapest recent iPhone costs 2x what the cheapest Steam Deck does. The iPhone does not have any inputs beyond on-screen controls (unless you're adding even more money on top). The iPhone can't run your Steam library. Comparing these is like comparing a store-bought Magnum ice cream to premium hand-made gelato - the latter is likely to taste better, but it costs a lot more, is a lot less practical, and is a lot less available. They're different product categories. Apple's chips are damn impressive, but that doesn't really make them competitors in this regard.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Its still gonna be embarrassed

enjoy playing games on a crappy phone, whilst we enjoy full desktop games on a full featured handheld PC.

 

[Makaveli]

I'm hoping someone starts selling screen upgrades for the SD Either a 120Hz IPS or a 60Hz OLED would be quite nice for this. The chances of either existing in the right size and resolution though? Near zero, sadly. I disagree with your judgement on performance though - it seems adequate, and there'll always be something better coming in the future, so at some point you just have to go. LPDDR5+RDNA2 seems like an excellent point to try this out properly, even if 5nm RDNA2/3 with more CUs (and faster LPDDR5?) will obviously be better. That's just how technology works. This still so far seems to deliver good enough performance for what it's meant to do.

As I mentioned before I would love to see a Zen 3 based apu with RDNA3 for the next model however I would prefer 1080p and 60hz OLED instead of 120HZ. You will get far more games hitting that 60fps target.

IPhone 14 will destroy this in performance

Thanks for adding this clearly on topic for this thread lol

 

[Richards]

I want to see steam deck vs exynos 2200... 8cu vs 6cu on a phone

Destroy? Meh. Unlikely. Might it be more powerful? Sure. Though it's pretty hard to tell, as cross-platform comparisons are difficult, especially as the same benchmarks tend not to be run on phones and laptops. Sadly there aren't any Ryzen 4000 or 5000 listings in GFXBench's database, but the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro beat out the Ryzen 5 2400G by a bit - 26.7/27.4 fps at sustainable power draws vs. 23.9 for the 2400G (sadly direct links to the GFXBench database don't seem to work). That's a 12/14% lead at much lower power (3.8-3.9W for the iPhones vs. likely ~15W for the 2400G) though there are plenty of unknonws, like the RAM config for the tested laptops, background software, etc. Also, the iPhone here has a massive process node advantage, being TSMC 5nm vs. the GloFo 12nm of the 2400G. Going by the GFXBench database one might think the iPhone 13 is much faster, but as Anandtech showed (previous link), iPhones throttle heavily, and peak GPU performance is far higher than steady-state, thus those numbers are quite misleading.

In 3DMark Wild Life, UL's own testing gives the 12 Pro a score of 7716 (and a stability of 75%, meaning it throttles significantly, though no word on if the score is steady-state or at peak boost). I can only find a single score in 3DMark's database for a 5700U (and no other 4- or 5000-series u-series mobile APUs), which places it at 6714 in some unnamed Lenovo laptop, with an otherwise unknown configuration except for a 15W TDP. Whether this is DDR4 or LPDDR4X and at what speed is an unknown that can significantly skew results, plus the 5nm vs. 7nm advantage. So that's a potential 15% lead.

Though, of course, all of this is with Vega, not RDNA - and we know RDNA delivers a significant "IPC" (for lack of a better term) or performance/CU/clock speed boost compared to Vega. RDNA2 improves on this again. So how will an 8CU RDNA2-equipped APU with LPDDR5 at 15W perform? No idea. Might the iPhone 14 - which won't be out for a full year - be faster? Sure. Will it "destroy" it? No. If a 15% advantage is "destroying" something, then ... your scales are off. Remember, generational improvements in GPUs are shrinking every generation. Look at the perf/W table in the Anandtech article - the A13 is 35% faster than the A12 at steady-state, while the A14 is just 6% faster than the A13.

And besides, who cares? The cheapest recent iPhone costs 2x what the cheapest Steam Deck does. The iPhone does not have any inputs beyond on-screen controls (unless you're adding even more money on top). The iPhone can't run your Steam library. Comparing these is like comparing a store-bought Magnum ice cream to premium hand-made gelato - the latter is likely to taste better, but it costs a lot more, is a lot less practical, and is a lot less available. They're different product categories. Apple's chips are damn impressive, but that doesn't really make them competitors in this regard.

 

[Valantar]

I want to see steam deck vs exynos 2200... 8cu vs 6cu on a phone

That'll be interesting, especially if we get a Windows on ARM device using that chip. It'll also be an interesting CPU comparison between the more recent ARM designs and Zen with a somewhat comparable GPU. The memory subsystem of that mobile chip is likely going to hold it back, though on the other hand it might benefit from much lower latency with stacked RAM on the SoC.

As I mentioned before I would love to see a Zen 3 based apu with RDNA3 for the next model however I would prefer 1080p and 60ghz OLED instead of 120HZ. You will get far more games hitting that 60fps target.

1080p for gaming at this screen size isn't really necessary. Sure, it's visibly sharper, but you don't notice that much in actual gameplay - that's more for web browsing and stuff, which the SD just isn't going to be used for (using an on-screen keyboard on that thing looks like a nightmare). I'd much rather have 800p120 than 1080p60. The CPU - especially if they go Zen3 - should be able to deliver that in lighter titles. Zen3 is a bit of a trade-off though, as the cores are significantly larger than Zen2. I guess it might be an option for a future 5nm version, but I doubh they're willing to go up to 200mm² (if not higher) for a 7nm Zen3+RDNA3 version. At that point, sticking with Zen2 and adding a few more CUs is likely the better choice for performance.

 

[Imsochobo]

I'm glad I cancelled my Steam Deck pre-order. Honestly steam has a great idea here, but imo they should waited another APU generation or two, and did the OLED screen like Nintendo is doing.

I was one of the lucky ones and got my Switch OLED preorder in... arrives in about 14 days. Going to be gorgeous playing some of my fav indie games in OLED...

so you are willing to play at sub 30 FPS and just the oled is the argument for the switch ?
Oled screens are nice, but the library of the steamdeck is immense, it also has a lot of power vs the switch.
Many games get to 11 fps on the switch..............

 

[Makaveli]

That'll be interesting, especially if we get a Windows on ARM device using that chip. It'll also be an interesting CPU comparison between the more recent ARM designs and Zen with a somewhat comparable GPU. The memory subsystem of that mobile chip is likely going to hold it back, though on the other hand it might benefit from much lower latency with stacked RAM on the SoC.

1080p for gaming at this screen size isn't really necessary. Sure, it's visibly sharper, but you don't notice that much in actual gameplay - that's more for web browsing and stuff, which the SD just isn't going to be used for (using an on-screen keyboard on that thing looks like a nightmare). I'd much rather have 800p120 than 1080p60. The CPU - especially if they go Zen3 - should be able to deliver that in lighter titles. Zen3 is a bit of a trade-off though, as the cores are significantly larger than Zen2. I guess it might be an option for a future 5nm version, but I doubh they're willing to go up to 200mm² (if not higher) for a 7nm Zen3+RDNA3 version. At that point, sticking with Zen2 and adding a few more CUs is likely the better choice for performance.

Yes it would have to be a Zen3 apu on 5nm. Or even better Zen4 APU if not to expensive. And I would prefer 1080p 60hz you know everyone is going to complain why the old version and the new version still have the same 800p res. And I don't really think 120hz will make a huge difference on this system and just use more battery.

 

[Nordic]

Seems like most reasonable people had reasonable performance expectations. Short of games like cyberpunk, you will not struggle on performance.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Not sure if that performance is good or not, not without seeing things first hand.

Personally, I'd be content with an original GameBoy and some old favorites, such as the Final Fantasy games for it. I'm just not that hard up for playing PC games on a handheld. I dislike playing most games with a controller to begin with, so maybe that's my biggest dislike about it.

 

[Ferrum Master]

I don't know what's the hate about gaming on phone? Are you all blockheads? I game on anything at hand, if the time and place is right.

I game on phone while plane or bus. I played trough old classic Final Fantasy IX recently(I've finished the older ones too) and ran PSX and PS2 emulator. So what? I had a PSP too, what's the difference like playing handheld Tetris like in my childhood. I would be happy seeing Xenosaga, Chrono Cross RPG's anywhere, and those things are easily played on mobile. I actually have played a a bit Black Desert and peeked into Genshin Impact. And those look and perform great within the envelope.

The real issue are controls, game has to be tailored or be slow paced like RPG's are. I cannot deny there are no problems for shooters with gyro assist, but this applies to Steam Deck and Phones. You may have like millions of older PC titles, what's the point, they will be hardly playable because of controls not the lack of horsepower. The dedicated controls, the deck has won't help with nutty PC titles where controls are hard tailored for the keyboard and mouse. If it is playable on controller, there are usually no problems to game it on touch only controls either.

 

[Lightofhonor]

Its still gonna be embarrassed

Wait, are you saying a $700+ mobile device will be better than a $400+ mobile device!?