If you have a recent flagship android phone you probably don’t need a Steam Deck.
My old Samsung S23 Ultra and a phone cooler and controller is basically just as good as a steam deck these days. I was playing Hades next to my gf last night, we were both playing the same game and it looked way better on my setup and the game ran smooth for both of us.
Compared to the Steam Deck my phone is
120hz and nearly double the resolution,
The snapdragon 8 gen 2 CPU and Adreno 740 GPU have more Gflops,
It only has 12gb of ram vs the Steam Deck’s 16gb.
The Steam Deck also runs on Linux and has more compatibility. I’d rather have a Steam Deck personally but it’s hard to justify buying it when I have something that is nearly just as good.
I was about to buy a some kinda pc handheld then stumbled upon the Odin 3 and then realized my phone is basically the same specs and basically with some decent cooling and how far GameNaitive has come, it’s a pretty decent gaming handheld. Not to mention this phone uses the aluminum back to help cool so adding on cooling is super easy. I use the GameSir X5 phone controller and the FX5 Thermoelectric Cooler which I kinda have to angle around my camera to get over the cpu and gpu but it works quite well.
I have an another one with a super beat up screen that still works that I’m going to try and setup in dex mode for a steam console/emulation station on one of my TVs. There are even guys taking apart phones and putting them in these cute little baby pc towers with crazy cooling on YouTube.
Anyways I didn’t know all this till recently so just spreading the word.
A couple things, Hades isn’t a good comparison since it has a pretty good optimized android port. You won’t get nearly as favorable a comparison on other games if one’s running on the Deck and the other is running through GameNative. The FEX compatibility layer will have a performance hit vs running on x86 hardware, although I don’t know if anyone has found a good way to measure it yet.
For RAM, the S23 has a slower memory bus than the deck, and Android + background processes will typically use 4-6GB of the system RAM. So you’re generally left 6-8GB for your combined RAM/VRAM, accessed at a slower speed, which will severely hamper a lot of more modern games.
For TFLOPS, phones are usually rated at a peak rating, rather than something that can be consistently sustained. A big part of this is thermals, which an external cooler will help with a lot. But you’re still going to probably have pretty significant decrease in performance outside of those peaks, typically only 50-60% of the peak power. There’s also practical TDP limits, even high end phones have a max TDP of 5-7w vs the Deck’s 15w limit, which will limit how much it can run.
It’s also just kinda nice to have a separate, low fuss gaming device. I can grab up the deck and immediately continue playing where I left off in seconds. I used to play more games on my phone before the deck, but I had constant issues with calls and other interruptions making it hard to get proper play sessions in. I typically gave up on playing any game that didn’t have save on exit, because of all the lost progress. And your setup sounds like it takes longer to setup, needing a cooler and controller setup each time you go to play.
I agree that the comparison makes no sense. However, your TDP comparison also makes no sense. Firstly, TDP is not power consumption. It’s basically an arbitrary number and all chip manufacturers have a different equation for it. Secondly, you can’t compare the TDP of x86 and ARM. The latter is way more efficient.
ARM is specifically better at switching to a low power state. This makes it much more power efficient for low power states like web browsing or video playback, but has a much smaller impact on things like playing games. Add in the CPU overhead from fex, and you probably won’t see any lower power usage from ARM hardware vs x86 to run the same games.
A) you’re ignoring the tdp thing and B) you’re proposing a hypothetical scenario for which you can’t provide any actual numbers. This thread is literally pointless. I’m out.
What I was trying to say about TDP is that if the effective power efficiency is about the same for both, then the higher TDP will be a direct improvement in how much performance the device is able to put out.
It’s kinda the opposite of the relationship between the Deck and other more powerful handhelds. A lot of them are more powerful mostly because they have a max TDP of 25w. We’ve also seen this with new graphics cards, where the GPU power usage gets higher each year.
Now that Moore’s law is dead, one of the easiest way to have a more powerful device is to make it where it can utilize more power. If two devices are comparable in power efficiency, usually the device the uses the most electricity will be the most powerful.
If you have a recent flagship android phone you probably don’t need a Steam Deck.
My old Samsung S23 Ultra and a phone cooler and controller is basically just as good as a steam deck these days. I was playing Hades next to my gf last night, we were both playing the same game and it looked way better on my setup and the game ran smooth for both of us.
Compared to the Steam Deck my phone is 120hz and nearly double the resolution, The snapdragon 8 gen 2 CPU and Adreno 740 GPU have more Gflops, It only has 12gb of ram vs the Steam Deck’s 16gb. The Steam Deck also runs on Linux and has more compatibility. I’d rather have a Steam Deck personally but it’s hard to justify buying it when I have something that is nearly just as good.
I was about to buy a some kinda pc handheld then stumbled upon the Odin 3 and then realized my phone is basically the same specs and basically with some decent cooling and how far GameNaitive has come, it’s a pretty decent gaming handheld. Not to mention this phone uses the aluminum back to help cool so adding on cooling is super easy. I use the GameSir X5 phone controller and the FX5 Thermoelectric Cooler which I kinda have to angle around my camera to get over the cpu and gpu but it works quite well.
I have an another one with a super beat up screen that still works that I’m going to try and setup in dex mode for a steam console/emulation station on one of my TVs. There are even guys taking apart phones and putting them in these cute little baby pc towers with crazy cooling on YouTube.
Anyways I didn’t know all this till recently so just spreading the word.
A couple things, Hades isn’t a good comparison since it has a pretty good optimized android port. You won’t get nearly as favorable a comparison on other games if one’s running on the Deck and the other is running through GameNative. The FEX compatibility layer will have a performance hit vs running on x86 hardware, although I don’t know if anyone has found a good way to measure it yet.
For RAM, the S23 has a slower memory bus than the deck, and Android + background processes will typically use 4-6GB of the system RAM. So you’re generally left 6-8GB for your combined RAM/VRAM, accessed at a slower speed, which will severely hamper a lot of more modern games.
For TFLOPS, phones are usually rated at a peak rating, rather than something that can be consistently sustained. A big part of this is thermals, which an external cooler will help with a lot. But you’re still going to probably have pretty significant decrease in performance outside of those peaks, typically only 50-60% of the peak power. There’s also practical TDP limits, even high end phones have a max TDP of 5-7w vs the Deck’s 15w limit, which will limit how much it can run.
It’s also just kinda nice to have a separate, low fuss gaming device. I can grab up the deck and immediately continue playing where I left off in seconds. I used to play more games on my phone before the deck, but I had constant issues with calls and other interruptions making it hard to get proper play sessions in. I typically gave up on playing any game that didn’t have save on exit, because of all the lost progress. And your setup sounds like it takes longer to setup, needing a cooler and controller setup each time you go to play.
I agree that the comparison makes no sense. However, your TDP comparison also makes no sense. Firstly, TDP is not power consumption. It’s basically an arbitrary number and all chip manufacturers have a different equation for it. Secondly, you can’t compare the TDP of x86 and ARM. The latter is way more efficient.
ARM is specifically better at switching to a low power state. This makes it much more power efficient for low power states like web browsing or video playback, but has a much smaller impact on things like playing games. Add in the CPU overhead from fex, and you probably won’t see any lower power usage from ARM hardware vs x86 to run the same games.
A) you’re ignoring the tdp thing and B) you’re proposing a hypothetical scenario for which you can’t provide any actual numbers. This thread is literally pointless. I’m out.
What I was trying to say about TDP is that if the effective power efficiency is about the same for both, then the higher TDP will be a direct improvement in how much performance the device is able to put out.
It’s kinda the opposite of the relationship between the Deck and other more powerful handhelds. A lot of them are more powerful mostly because they have a max TDP of 25w. We’ve also seen this with new graphics cards, where the GPU power usage gets higher each year.
Now that Moore’s law is dead, one of the easiest way to have a more powerful device is to make it where it can utilize more power. If two devices are comparable in power efficiency, usually the device the uses the most electricity will be the most powerful.
deleted by creator