Steam Deck on steroids running top games at 4K and 60 FPS, but it has a catch
It is the console of the moment, after the launch of PS5 and Xbox Series X, the most anticipated by players has begun to reach the general public who reserved it back in 2021. Now we see how the experiments begin.
We all knew what was going to happen as soon as the Valve console reached consumers. A console full of ports and connections where the operating system is Linux? The madness of the computer scientists was not going to take long to arrive.
Because, deep down, the Steam Deck is not a console, as many people believe, but a laptop with the form factor of the Nintendo Switch. But that does not make it a console, but a very easy to transport PC.
And the journalists of the YouTube channel ETA Prime have embarked on this adventure, who decided add some graphics power to the Steam Deck by connecting a Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card to the Steam console. And yes, we are talking about the most powerful graphics card from AMD.
Since Valve’s Steam Deck doesn’t have a Thunderbolt 3/4 port, they had to use the M.2 slot that the ultra-fast SSDs plug into.since it has a PCIe x4 interface, and a special adapter that allows you to connect an additional card in said slot.
Using the M.2 slot deprived the console of its local storagewhich means they had to use a microSD card to store their games, and microSD cards are considerably slower than SSDs.
But for experiment and entertainment, things worked out fine. They also installed Windows 11 with its latest drivers, although it is likely that in the future modifications can be made to work with Linux.
and although adding one of the best graphics cards to a low-power quad-core APU-based system doesn’t make much sense in the real world, the important thing was to find out how things worked. All is for science.
In doing sothe Steam Deck became a mid-range desktop with an obscenely powerful graphics card. If they fixed the storage problem, surely more than one would consider it as a laptop / console.
As expected, the Radeon RX 6900 XT performed better than the integrated GPU. In this configuration, the Steam Deck was able to handle titles like The Witcher 3, GTA5, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077 and God of War at 4K resolution and almost 60 FPS.
Of course, the bottleneck is caused by the processor, which is a Ryzen APU with an excellent power to consumption ratio, but which cannot handle the power that the RX 6900 XT delivers. As I experience well, in terms of its usefulness we can say that it is not worth it.
Reference-computerhoy.com