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sc94597 said:
Kristof81 said:

 Good luck with running modern games from the SD card. 

The fastest consumer SD cards widely available have read speeds of 300 MBPS. That is double a decent 7200 RPM HDD and roughly comparable to older SATA SSD's. Plenty fine for gaming. Especially since texture quality is going to be low-medium on this due to other bottlenecks.

I don't see why this would be a huge problem. You could also get top-HDD level SD cards with read speeds of about 100-170 MBPS. After a quick search I found a 512 Gb with 170 MBps read speeds for $164.99 or a 512 Gb with 100 MBps read speeds for $69.99.

That is currently. This isn't releasing until December, and probably will be on the market for many years to come. Storage prices are still falling over time. 

Besides with a dock, I am guessing you can attach external SSDs. Switch out games you are playing portably which have longer load times to the internal memory, and games with shorter load times to the SD. 

And then there is the matter of repacks of cracked games, which probably will inevitably happen. 

Keep in mind Mbps is based on bits, not bytes.

In saying that... UHS-II cards allow for a maximum transfer speed of 312 MB/s, which is definitely shitting on those older SLC SSD's from over a decade ago.
UHS-I is 104MB/s which is still more than enough.

shikamaru317 said:

Actually they list the dynamic frequency range for both the CPU and the GPU in the specs. The GPU clock ranges between 1000 MHz and 1600 MHz, which if my math is right means that flops range between 1000 gflop and 1600 gflop (compared to Switch which has 2 handheld performance profiles available to devs at 157 gflop and 196 gflop, and 393 gflops when docked). The 4 core, 8 thread Zen 2 CPU meanwhile has a dynamic range from 2.4 GHz to 3.5 GHz, compared to Switch's 4 Core ARM CPU at 1.02 GHz. 

My assumption is that the Steam Deck will tend to throttle down to the the lower clocks when not connected to a power source, handheld in other words, and will tend to throttle up towards the high end of the dynamic range while charging or docked. Heat will also play some factor, with the system throttling down when it gets too hot. 

Flops are irrelevant.
Math is pretty simple ayway. 8CU*64 = 512 * 2 * 1600 = 1.63 Teraflops.

numberwang said:

Switch V2 gets 5+ hours of BotW and 7+ hours of Smash. Crysis remastered is unoptimized garbage but it still gets nearly 4 hours on Switch V2.

I know. I provided evidence for it.
The point of the "unoptimized garbage" is to showcase worst-case scenarios.

Also BotW isn't the most demanding Switch game, remember it is a WiiU port and not a game built from the ground up to take advantage of every single ounce of the Switch's capabilities... Plus it was a launch title, games get more demanding on hardware as time goes on.

Either way, feel free to peruse that link I provided prior and check out the battery life times of various games.

numberwang said:

We are talking about 2015 X1 tech here at 16nm. Modern ARM will destroy anything X86 in power per watt at the lower end.

Not always.

numberwang said:

That thing does look really big with its large side extensions. The screen has large bezels like the non OLED Switch and 16:9 games will run with additional top&bottom borders on the 1280x800 display.

Agreed. Screen could be better.

numberwang said:

Max textures on a mediocre 1280x800 small screen are wasted. Skyward Sword is a ported Wii game that was developed for SD tube tvs.

Texture resolution and final output resolution are separate issues.

You can definitely see the difference between SD and 4k textures on a 720P display.

Either way, with DDR5 system memory and 8 CU's, this isn't going to be doing ultra textures in games anyway.

shikamaru317 said:

Congrats! I'll probably get one at some point next year, waiting to see some post-launch tests first, like:

  • How well will it run high end 9th gen games? Can it run them on low settings at 720p, or are the specs still not enough for that?
  • How will performance on games compare on Steam OS and Windows?
  • Is the SD card slot really limited to UHS-I speed (104 MB/s) or can it use higher end UHS-II or UHS-III SD cards without capping their speed? 

I'm also hoping to see Microsoft make a Native Xbox app for it, so that you can not only stream xCloud games without using the web browser, but also wi-fi stream games from your Xbox Series to your Steam Deck, cutting out the latency issues of streaming those same games from the nearest xCloud data center. 

Anyone who has used a Ryzen 5700u notebook with the integrated graphics will know that 720P games are more than capable on a device such as this.

Steam OS due to it's design has lower overhead than Windows, but also worst game support. Catch 22.

You can stream all Xbox games to a PC without the need for Xcloud, just need a console and the Xbox companion app... You can then run this on your high-bandwidth 5ghz home wireless, which is low latency.
But to be fair, you could also run the Xbox companion app on a $50 Android phone... So...

I feel streaming games over your Wifi to a mobile device is basically taking the original concept of the WiiU, but actually making that functionality usable as you are no longer limited to just a room or two in distance.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--