We all knew what would happen once the Valve console reached consumers. A console full of ports and connections, where is the operating system – Linux? The madness of computer scientists was not long in coming.
Because at heart, Steam Deck is not a console, as many believe, but a laptop with the Nintendo Switch form factor. But this does not make it a console, but very convenient for transporting a PC.
And journalists of the ETA Prime YouTube channel embarked on this adventure, who decided Add some graphics power to your Steam Deck by connecting your Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card to your Steam console. And yes, we are talking about the most powerful video card from AMD.
Since Valve’s Steam Deck doesn’t have a Thunderbolt 3/4 port, they had to use an M.2 slot that connects ultra-fast SSDs.as it has a PCIe x4 interface and a special adapter that allows you to connect an additional card to the specified slot.
Using the M.2 slot deprived the console of local storagewhich means they had to use a microSD card to store their games, and microSD cards are significantly slower than SSDs.
But for the experiment and entertainment, everything turned out great. They also installed Windows 11 with the latest drivers. although it is likely that modifications to work with Linux may be made in the future.
and although adding one of the best graphics cards to a low-end quad-core APU-based system doesn’t make much sense in the real world, it was important to find out how everything works. All for science.
WhereinSteam Deck has become a mid-range desktop with an obscenely powerful graphics card. If they fixed the storage issue, surely many would view it as a laptop/console.
As expected, the Radeon RX 6900 XT performed better than the integrated GPU. In this configuration, the Steam deck could handle titles such as The Witcher 3, GTA5, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077 and God of War in 4K resolution and almost 60 FPS.
Of course, the bottleneck is caused by the CPU, which is a Ryzen APU with a great power to power ratio but can’t handle the power that the RX 6900 XT delivers. From experience it is good, from the point of view of usefulness, we can say that it is not worth it.
Source: Computer Hoy
