The Steam Deck is easily one of the most exciting pieces of gaming hardware on the horizon, and select users around the world have gotten a first look at it. Studios have begun receiving dev kits for the Steam Deck, which where these benchmark tests come from, courtesy of Ranger, who performed tests across different games on different settings to see whether the device can hold its own.
These benchmark tests were done on a Steam Deck dev kit, meaning that the performance might be slightly different in the retail version of the device, it is probably not a stretch to assume that the performance in the final retail version will be at least similar. The Steam Deck is powered by a custom AMD APU, which utilizes the Zen 2 and RDNA 2 and brings them to a single chip.
Steam Deck benchmark tests show 60 FPS performance across various games
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the testing was done across 4 different games, namely: 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.
According to the tests, setting Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s graphics preset to the highest quality resulted in a pretty steady 36 FPS, but bringing the preset down by a little, the framerate immediately shot up to somewhere north of 60 FPS. The testing seems to suggest that there was hardly any stuttering while using the highest available graphics preset at @30 FPS.
Doom yielded similar results with a framerates floating around 60 FPS at Medium preset, although after some changes to the preset and improving image quality, the Steam Deck could run game quite smoothly at 46 FPS. As is to be expected, DOTA 2 was an incredibly positive showing for the device as it was able to maintain a steady 80 FPS at low settings preset and a respectable 47 FPS at the highest. While the controls did feel awkward during testing, the performance itself is not too shabby.
Cyberpunk 2077 was perhaps the most interesting of all games that were tested on the Steam Deck as the game has a certain reputation. On the highest settings preset, the performance fluctuated between 20 and 30 frames per second. The experience was, according to testing, quite smooth – and an important thing of note was that the device’s temperature was within the acceptable range during gameplay, even on the highest settings.
The temperature on the back of the device was around 42.6°C, while the grip’s was around 29°C. On the flipside, the battery seemed to have suffered, as after 3 hours of gameplay, the capacity dropped from 100% to 46%. 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.
