Steam Deck is now on sale, and Valve has simultaneously lifted the ban on game reviews. Tom’s Hardware has now announced the performance of several games on Steam Deck.
First, Shadow of the Tomb Raider has a native Linux version, which Steam marks as “playable.” In the “lowest” preset, the game can run at 63 fps, up to 54 fps in low quality, and only 38 fps in highest quality.
TH believes that part of the reason the game performs so well is that it runs natively on Linux without having to go through the Proton emulation layer. In Red Dead Redemption 2, it was around 50fps at a minimum quality.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is a fully Steam Deck verified game. The game can hit 48 fps on the performance-first preset, but only 30 fps on the best quality preset. Borderlands 3 also hit playable levels, hitting 57fps at the lowest quality preset, but only 30fps at high.
Civilization VI is marked playable on the Steam Deck, but even though the game has a Linux version, you have to force it to use Proton to run. Civilization VI can run at 76fps at the lowest quality, 70fps at medium quality, and 44fps at the highest quality.
Also, it’s important to note that there won’t be much difference in frame rate between running the game on SSD and SD card, it’s just that the latter will load slower.
Foreign media pointed out that Steam Deck is pre-installed with the Linux-based Steam OS, and the graphics card driver under Windows 11 has not been released, so the performance under Windows 11 has not been announced yet.
Steam Deck is equipped with AMD’s Van Gogh APU, and its CPU part adopts Zen2 architecture, 4-core specifications, 2.4 GHz to 3.5 GHz. In the GPU part, the Van Gogh APU integrates an 8 CU RDNA2 GPU with a frequency of 1.0 GHz to 1.6 GHz and performance of 1.6TFops FP32. The TDP of the entire SoC is 4 to 15W, and it supports LPDDR5 memory with a capacity of 16GB.
Steam Deck is available with 64GB eMMC and 256GB, 512GB NVMe SSD, priced at $399, $529 and $649.