Deck developer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, has detailed that Valve is targeting 800p and 30Hz for games running on the new Steam Deck handheld gaming PC. Valve has been slowly drip-feeding information about the new Steam Deck, via its IGN best buds, over the past week and has recently published a bunch of information about the key hardware at the heart of the device.As well as detailing the process and performance of having part of your game library sat on an SD card, and the fact that Valve has still yet to find a game the Deck can't handle, key people on the Steam Deck project have talked a bit more about the actual performance of the device itself.Thanks to running on the latest AMD APU\u2014a quad-core Zen 2 CPU with an 8 CU RDNA 2\u2014Valve believes it's got enough power in the device to cope with the rigours of modern gaming, albeit at a 30 fps level. And it feels like the current trends towards high-res, high-fps gaming is actually helping.\u00a0\u00ab\u00a0If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms,\u00a0\u00bb says Griffais, \u00ab\u00a0I think that content will scale down to our 800p, 30Hz target really well.\u00a0\u00bb<\/b>
\nDeck developer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, has detailed that Valve is targeting 800p and 30Hz for games running on the new Steam Deck handheld gaming PC. Valve has been slowly drip-feeding information about the new Steam Deck, via its IGN best buds, over the past week and has recently published a bunch of information about the key hardware at the heart of the device. As well as detailing the process and performance of having part of your game library sat on an SD card, and the fact that Valve has still yet to find a game the Deck can’t handle, key people on the Steam Deck project have talked a bit more about the actual performance of the device itself. Thanks to running on the latest AMD APU\u2014a quad-core Zen 2 CPU with an 8 CU RDNA 2\u2014Valve believes it’s got enough power in the device to cope with the rigours of modern gaming, albeit at a 30 fps level. And it feels like the current trends towards high-res, high-fps gaming is actually helping. \u00ab\u00a0If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms,\u00a0\u00bb says Griffais, \u00ab\u00a0I think that content will scale down to our 800p,30Hz target really well.\u00a0\u00bb Though he does sound a note of caution about what might happen for people who want to favour image quality instead, noting that \u00ab\u00a0we might be in a position where we might have trade offs, but we haven’t really seen that yet.\u00a0\u00bb And while it hasn’t seen existing games the Steam Deck can’t handle, Valve is also confident about performance going forward too. \u00ab\u00a0I think a big factor is that we are using the latest generation GPU from AMD,\u00a0\u00bb says hardware engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat. \u00ab\u00a0We are using a new generation CPU from AMD, even the memory itself actually, we are using LPDDR5, which is brand new to the industry. I think we might actually be one of the first products to showcase this new memory technology. In that sense it gives us a lot of future proofing.\u00a0\u00bb Aldehayyat also goes on to talk about other systems using the same architecture, and could well be talking about RDNA 2 optimisations being made for Xbox Series X\/S and PlayStation 5 systems helping out the Steam Deck too. Peak Storage (Image credit: Future) Best SSD for gaming: the best solid state drives around Best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming: the next gen has landed The best NVMe SSD: this slivers of SSD goodness Best external hard drives: expand your horizons Best external SSDs: plug in upgrades for gaming laptops and consoles \u00ab\u00a0We’re not the only people with this architecture,\u00a0\u00bb he says, \u00ab\u00a0any user that has it, and any optimisation game developers make for this new architecture will carry forward to all system makers too. So I think we’re in a great place.\u00a0\u00bb There is also the possibility that Aldehayyat is talking about other potential systems manufacturers might be making, built around the same custom ‘Van Gogh’ AMD APU, and sporting Valve’s SteamOS 3.0 operating system. Big boss, Gabe Newell, has spoken about wanting the Steam Deck to open up a new product category, \u00ab\u00a0which could have long-term benefits\u00a0\u00bb for Valve as a company, after all.<\/p>\n