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With a Nintendo Switch 2 on the way, I hope Valve make a Steam Deck 2
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Leaks say a lot things, and are almost always wrong. The idea that you could put a PS4 level of performance in a handheld with reasonable battery life is absurd.
Valve put a damn good custom amd apu in the deck, and it's limited to 15w if they really wanted they could just slap a higher power limit and get way more performance. But then it would run too hot and it's battery life would be practically non-existent. And considering that was a partnership with AMD to help design that I highly doubt Nintendo has magically figured out something that neither valve nor AMD knew in terms of how to get that kind of performance out of a small power budget
But it’s not just a handheld is it? I imagine they would unlock the wattage only when docked.
That still requires a cooling system capable of handling the higher power, which will make the unit bigger, heavier, and less portable
The dock could take care of that.
This just shows you have no idea how cooling works. The most you could add to the external dock will be a fan, there's only so much a fan can do the bottleneck is that your systems cooler is simply not large enough. A fan cannot make up for a copper heat sink that is too small, take a good look at the iFixit teardowns of the steam deck and look at how much copper that thing is working with and that's already one of the larger handhelds. You couldn't put a ps4 amount of power through that no matter how much fan you gave it
No, no it can't. Plenty of videos of people putting absolutely stupid powerful fans on tiny heatsinks with big overclocked cpu and it's unable to keep up until they swap to a bigger heatsink.
There is a limit to how much heat a given amount of heatsink can disperse and there is a limit to how quickly that can transfer to air. If the heatsink is too small no amount of extra airflow will fix it.
The ratios are the same, you just can't find videos of people doing it with small things because that's not as interesting. There is still ultimately a limit to how much a given amount of heat sink can transfer heat to air even with a small processor.
20w TDP would be possible with some extra forced air from a dock. Mainly because some handhelds can be put to 20 tdp, and they technically work although they hit thermal throttling at 90c almost immediately. With a little bit of forced air from a dock you should be able to bring that down to a much more reasonable 80c
The steam deck is already about as powerful as a ps4 though? Also, the switch uses arm which is more efficient.
I'm sure you're getting that from the many Reddit comparisons. But in every one of those I've looked at the one thing that they forget is that the PS4 is playing at 1080P and the steam deck is playing at 720P.
If you use the official dock on a 1080p monitor the steam deck starts to fall behind the PS4 rather quickly. It is true that on paper the steam deck Apu is getting close to the PS4 but that's without taking into account the TDP that the steam deck has set or the fact that steam deck is running at a lower resolution.
It gets even Messier when you take into account that not all games will run at 1080p on the ps4, some of them have Dynamic resolution support to maintain better performance at which point comparing the games becomes extremely difficult.
But if you just look at Absolute raw CPU and GPU compute numbers the steam deck isn't quite at the level of the PS4 which makes sense because it doesn't have access to quite as much power. It is much newer which is why it gets as close as it does. And if it had a 20 watt TDP I'm willing to bet it could beat it in most things, but as it stands because of the limitations of the cooling necessitating a lower TDP it's not quite there.
You are correct that arm is generally more power efficient but that's only the CPU, we don't know what type of Graphics they will be using and for a gaming device that's a fairly important piece of information. Nvidia doesn't really make mobile arm gpus anymore so they can't go with them, and if they go with one of the Arm based gpus those are significantly behind in terms of performance. They are good enough for your cell phone but they don't compare to AMD or Nvidia.
They probably will use an Nvidia chip, every leak suggests they're going to use the T239 and even if they don't use that chip specifically it would make sense to use an Nvidia chip, because like you said, nobody else really makes good mobile gpus.
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-inside-nvidias-latest-hardware-for-nintendo-what-is-the-t239-processor