Steam Deck: the SoC is called Aerith, Valve recommends the cap for FPS

Steam Deck

During the Steamworks Virtual Conference, Valve revealed curiosities and details of Steam Deck, its upcoming hybrid between a PC and a portable console. For example, he said that the device's SoC has a particular code name: Aerith (the character from Final Fantasy VII ed). Of course there are also some more interesting technical details, such as those illustrated by Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat:

"The real novelty of our processor is that it has been designed from the ground up to be optimized with a power of 4 to 15 watts thanks to its form factor. "According to Aldehayyat, the performance per watt of the Steam Deck would not have been possible with any other processor on the market.

However, there are no limits on how much power it can consume the Steam Deck, so Valve recommends developers add a frame rate limiter for their games. That said, the company of Half-Life is working on a global frame rate limiter that users will be able to use to balance the battery consumption and performance of their Steam Deck.

Aldehayyat then explained that the CPU clocks and GPUs have been kept low because Valve wants game performance to be stable in all possible scenarios. For this reason, boost technologies such as those of laptops or smartphones have been excluded.

Aldehayyat also explained the reasons for adopting 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, which can be summarized as: they allow you to reduce consumption, for example by playing to 2D titles, or when the console is in Idle or Sleep mode. However, there is also another reason: Valve wants the Steam Deck to be usable for many years. So, even though most games on Steam currently require 8 or 12GB of RAM to run, 16GB was felt to be the best choice to have no problems in the future.

The presentation ended by showing the different speeds of the SSDs mounted on the different models. Of course, the model with 512GB NVMe SSD is the fastest in loading and booting the Deck, but the performance is still excellent on all versions.

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