Pierre-Loup Griffais, a coder at Valve, said that Valve's new handheld gaming PC, Steam Deck, targets 30 fps for games with a native resolution of 800p, "a level we consider playable in our performance tests The "performance test" refers to the level at which the game is deemed playable in the [Furthermore, according to Griffe, the Steam Deck will have "an optional built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune performance and battery life. Presumably the limiter can be enabled from an overlay, ideally remembering the settings selected by the player for each game.

Valve, through its good friend at IGN, has been gradually providing information about the new Steam Deck, and recently released a lot of information about the key hardware at the heart of this device.

In addition to detailing the process and performance of storing a portion of their game library on the SD card, and the fact that Valve has yet to find a game that the Deck cannot handle, the key people behind the Steam Deck project have also been able to provide some actual performance in a bit more detail.

Thanks to running on the latest AMD APUs (quad-core Zen 2 CPU and 8 CU RDNA 2), Valve believes the device has enough power to handle the rigors of modern gaming. And they feel that the current trend toward high-resolution, high-fps games is actually helping.

"If people still value high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms, I think content will scale down nicely to the 800p, 30Hz target," Griffe said.

He cautions, however, about what will happen to those who want to prioritize image quality instead, noting, "We may be in a position where there may be a tradeoff, but we haven't really seen it yet."

And while he has not identified any existing games that Steam Deck cannot handle, Valve is confident in its future performance.

"I think a big factor is that we are using AMD's latest generation of GPUs," says hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat. We're using AMD's new generation of CPUs, and the memory itself uses LPDDR5, which is brand new in the industry. We think we will be one of the first products to introduce this new memory technology. In that sense we have a lot of promise."

Aldehayat also spoke about other systems using the same architecture, possibly talking about RDNA 2 optimizations for the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 systems, which are also helping Steam Deck.

"We're not the only ones using this architecture. So I think we are in a great place."

Aldehayyat could also be talking about other potential systems the manufacturer might make, built around the same custom "Van Gogh" AMD APU and powered by Valve's SteamOS 3.0 operating system.

Big Boss Gabe Newell has said that he hopes Steam Deck will open up a new product category, which could ultimately be "long-term profitable" for Valve.