SFF.Network Digital Foundry Reviews Steam Deck

The pixel counting experts of Digital Foundry have finally released their review of Valve's Steam Deck, and they are impressed. Their testing revealed that the SteamDeck can come very close to matching the original PS4 quality level at 720P resolution. That translates to console style settings, at 30FPs, at a 720P resolution. This is substantially faster than the Vega 8 GPUs in the 4000 series of portable Ryzen CPUs.

Downsides included a screen that was lacking adaptive refresh rate, and was merely decent in color reproduction. Valve does include a OS level 30FPS and VSYNC lock to assist with this. Additionally, there are numerous upscaling options. Aside from the screen issues, Digital Foundry found that the fan noise was high pitched and can be intrusive.

Check out the Digital Foundry review below.

 

[Phuncz]

I'm disappointed Variable Refresh Rate is not a feature, considering FreeSync is just available with AMD hardware and it works wonders. So probably the panel they sourced was so good, VRR was less of a miss than other screen supplier options. Hopefully the SteamDeck v2.0 will have this.

 

[Revenant]

I'm disappointed Variable Refresh Rate is not a feature, considering FreeSync is just available with AMD hardware and it works wonders. So probably the panel they sourced was so good, VRR was less of a miss than other screen supplier options. Hopefully the SteamDeck v2.0 will have this.

THIS.

FreeSync should have been in this especially with the lack of power of the system. A variable 40 to 45 FPS feels a lot smoother than 30FPS locked. I'm guessing that one of two things happened:

1. They couldn't find a panel with VRR in that size for the price point they wanted.

2. They figured games would just lock at 30 FPS.