Steam held a development live stream for its Deck handheld console, highlighting the various aspects of the device. In terms of the APU powering it, we learned that it’s an SoC codenamed Aerith. The CPU consists of four Zen 2 cores and eight threads with a boost clock of up to 3.5GHz. On the GPU side, we’re looking at an RDNA 2 GPU with 8 Compute Units or 512 shaders, the same as the Renoir and Cezanne APUs.
For memory, the Deck has a total of 16GB LPDDR5, out of which 1GB is reserved for the GPU. Overall the GPU can use up to 8GB of shared system memory. This results in a peak throughput of 1.6 TFLOPs for the GPU. The SoC has a TDP of 15W, with low power states of just 4W.
In addition to this, AMD spokesperson Sebastien Nussbaum spoke a bit about the drivers and the firmware powering the Aerith SoC. The most noteworthy query he got was with respect to AMD FidelityFX (FSR) upscaling technology. Nussbaum confirmed that the Steam Deck supports FSR on an OS level.
This means that gamers will be able to leverage the spatial upscaling technology not only in games with native support for it but also titles that don’t feature FSR in the graphics menu. It is integrated at the operating system level, with Valve preparing a new release of SteamOS 3.0 based on Arch Linux. Steam Deck will also use SmartShift, which is AMD’s method to intelligently improve the CPU and GPU depending on the load. The power is diverted to the component that needs it, relaxing the one that is underutilized.
