During the Steamworks Virtual Conference dedicated to the Steam Deck, Valve shared a lot more information on the hardware of its upcoming PC handheld system.

To begin with, we learned that the custom SoC used in the Steam Deck is codenamed Aerith. The APU block, a combination of AMD’s Zen 2 and RDNA2 technologies, was specifically designed to accommodate the low target requirement for power (the TDP is 4-15W). In the dedicated Steam Deck hardware presentation, Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat explained:

Still, there’s no hard limit on how much power can be consumed by the Steam Deck, which is why Valve recommends that developers add a frame rate limiter to their games. Even if they don’t, a global frame rate limiter is in the works so that users may eventually get to pick the optimal balance between performance and battery life that suits their needs.

The CPU and GPU clocks are relatively low because Valve expressly wants gaming performance to be consistent in all scenarios. As such, they’ve avoided adopting turbo boost technologies such as those used in laptops or smartphones.

Aldehayyat then proceeded to discuss the reasons for going with LPDDR5 memory.

The 16GB of memory are unified, as expected. Aldehayyat noted that most Steam games currently run fine on 8 or 12GB, but Valve desired the Steam Deck to be future-proof, which is why the company chose to add more memory.

The other advantage to LPDDR5 is power efficiency. It offers a lot of great power-saving features that truly manifest themselves in low power scenarios like 2D games, idle, and sleep.

The presentation ended with an early comparison of the differences between the various storage options available for the Steam Deck. As you can see in the benchmark below, the cheaper 64GB eMMC predictably loads and boots slower than the 512GB NVMe SSD, but the gameplay experience shouldn’t suffer too much even when picking the eMMC.

That’s not all we learned about the PC handheld system. In the Q&A section of the APU deep dive with AMD, Sebastian Nussbaum (Corporate VP of Product and Technologies at AMD’s Semi-Custom Business Unit) confirmed that FidelityFX Super Resolution will be introduced at an OS level in a future Steam Deck update. This means users will be able to enforce FSR in games that don’t have native support for it.

As a reminder, the Steam Deck’s debut was recently delayed to February 2022 due to components failing to reach manufacturing facilities in time for the previous December 2021 launch window.