Steam Deck has quietly become a reasonably capable ray tracing handheld

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Oliver Mackenzie is a Vancouver-based video producer and writer who has been a Digital Foundry contributor since 2021. Outside of gaming, he has produced video content for a range of news publications and nonprofits. He often falls victim to questionable eShop deals, and has never met an arcade racer he didn’t like.

Valve's Steam Deck is a highly capable piece of kit, often reaching parity with last-gen consoles at ~720p, while more demanding current-gen efforts can prove quite playable as well - even including some of the. The RDNA3 graphics hardware inside the Deck is even capable of ray tracing, though this support has largely been dormant in SteamOS.

Next up is Crysis 2 Remastered. This 2021 remaster of the 2011 classic features RT reflections on glossy surfaces. We're again using medium settings at 720p resolution here, with progressive increases in ray tracing fidelity translating to higher-res reflections traced against a more comprehensive BVH. The 'performance' setting is the best fit for our frame-rate target, with performance falling from the upper 50s with RT disabled to the mid-40s with it enabled.

We see a similar performance pattern in Persona 3 Reload. This recent release makes significant use of RT reflections, and the Steam Deck mostly acquits itself quite well, with performance often at or near 60fps. Unfortunately, the Deck struggles mightily when subjected to some of the game's heavier RT workloads in city areas, with severe performance dips.

Let's start with Crysis 2 Remastered. In the 15W mode in this shot, we get the typical mild uplift over Steam Deck, with a 24 percent uplift in performance. And if I dial the system up to its full 30W power, we get a 50 percent performance increase, which is about par for the course for the Ally. But if we get a face-full of RT, the Steam Deck falls a lot further behind, with the Ally 38 percent faster here in its performance mode.

The Steam Deck OLED is heavily outperformed in heavy RT scenes by the Asus ROG Ally when both are running on their native operating systems - SteamOS for the Deck and Windows 11 for the Ally. |Switching back to the Ally, you can run RT games with decent performance, especially if you tune the system to hit turbo frequencies.

Avatar fares a good deal better. Again, we're using the low settings preset, but I opted to target 720p with TAA as the game won't go below 720p internally with any reconstruction option. On the surface, the results don't look bad: we're clocking in at ~30fps and the game looks excellent, despite an obvious decrease to environmental detail.

 

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