That bolded part is either pretty dishonest or not well enough researched.

Bandwidth rose by 15%, that's true... but the game clock also rose by 12%, though in practice the difference is lower in the benchmarks as the boost clock didn't rise as much (only 5%) and the power limit for the GPU itself rose by 11% while the TDP of the entire card went from 300W to 350W. Performance in general went up by 5-10% depending on the game.

So pinning it all on the bandwidth feels pretty shady, as if you wanted to find a proof that AMD would  have been better had they chosen GDDR6X like NVidia. It did have an effect, but much smaller than you insinuated.

I said the main thing and didn't say the only thing... You should re-read the sentences before you reply to them. You also need to chill on your accusations.

True, sorry, jumped the gun a bit there, mea culpa for that.

It's still wrong though as it's not really the main thing, the clock speed increase does the heavy lifting here with 5 from the 5-10% increase stemming directly from it, which is why it felt dishonest to me. But I shouldn't have attacked you like that, sorry.

PCgamer's getting in on the "dOn'T fOrGeT tHe StEaM mAcHiNeS!" meme now...

Except it's not wrong. If you take say a Strix 6900XT LC and overclock it or take any high end 6900XT and overclock it, you can get pretty high frequencies in core. But what you can't get is the memory bandwidth that you can get from this 6900XT LC. So it really is the main thing that increased...

And don't worry about it. Just remember that I can make mistakes as well so feel free to point them out... Just with a less aggressive tone is preferred lol.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the target audience for Deck is. It looks too weak to run current AAA games even at lowest settings, which kinda makes it handheld for less demanding and retro games.

A new leak showed costumer mobile Alder Lake (so for companies, not consumers) will come out in Q1 next year, so possibly this also holds true for the consumer cards.

The good stuff:

The H45 chips all come with 6 big cores and 8 small cores (6C8c), which should be plenty in a gaming laptop or even for an mobile workstation
The U28 top-end chip also comes with the 6C8c configuration, while the other ones are 4C8c, still pretty good

The bad stuff:

U15, so your standard ultrabook chips, come with only 2C8c or 2C4c. Only 2 big cores can potentially hamper perforance a lot.
U9 is mostly the same, except they also come with 1C4c, which has already been proven with the Ice Lake chips of the same configuartion that it is weaker than just the 4c as those could otherwise clock higher and more than make up the singular high power core. This core is also the only one for U5, which is supposed to come for tablets.

They showed it running Star Wars: Fallen Order, Death Stranding and Control. Valve said it should run most current games on medium/high so no reason to doubt that. There's obviously an audience for it since hundreds of thousands hand preordered it (that we know).. Some of which are from VGC.

Like I've been wanting a portable PC like an Aya but couldn't justify spending that much on a handheld. With Deck, its low entry price its definitely something I can see using a lot for pick up and play games Yes this is low power device but tbh its astonishing that we actually have the tech to play these games at this quality in a handheld and Valve managed to that without passing the majority of cost to us.

Aren't those all 8th/9th cross-gen titles? I'm not disliking idea of fairly powerful handheld (though I don't have much interest in handhelds, no mater the power), but given that it is not a handheld of a publisher who has rich 1st party output, I'm finding it somewhat hard to wrap my head around it.

I mean, I could easily see MS doing something like this and "forcing" developers to have 3rd version of Xbox Series games and hit mainstream audience with it, but I'm not so sure about this one...unless they intend to release updated version every two years or so.

Not sure what to say other than this is obviously not for you. The Deck is more for power users, who want decent enough power to run most games (at a reasonable quality) on the go. It doesn't matter what first party games of such as in you get a PC in a form factor that's new to a lot of people. About games well there's thousands of games on PC and if we're talking 'exclusives' well Microsoft are releasing all their games on PC and Sony some of theirs. And you can also play Nintendo games on there with not much effort alongside legacy games via emulation.

About those games they are crossgen and current gen all things considered and realistically we can't expect it to run games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 without some tweaking and mods. Though with game engines like UE5 being super scalable and having it run Decima games, it should be fine for the most part. It wouldn't look too pretty but I'd imagine you could also lower resolution to 720P or play in lower resolutions and use FSR/TAA U to make a demanding game playable. Though being on a 7" screen with high pixel density I doubt you'd be able to see much of a downgrade in IQ with the help of some up-scaling.

And at the end of the day its more about the prospect of playing these games on a handheld and a small PC in your hands that excites a lot of us. Granted its not for everyone, there's definitely interest in such a device.