Steam Deck APU deep dive coming November 12

Valve and AMD will reveal tons of more info about the Steam Deck's APU and capabilities during a special November 12 stream.

Today Valve announced a Steamworks Virtual Conference dedicated entirely to the Steam Deck handheld-PC hybrid. The event starts on November 12 at 10am PST / 1pm EST and covers a myriad of topics like deep dives on the Steam Deck's custom AMD processor, game support, and much more.

The Steam Deck utilizes a custom SoC built on AMD's new Van Gogh line of low-power Ryzen APUs, which is the first APU that uses the RDNA 2 architecture. The Steam Deck's SoC features a 4-core, 8-thread Van Gogh APU with Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2.0 GPU that's more powerful than the AYA Neo Vega handheld.

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Valve worked closely with AMD to create an APU that's powerful, efficient, and flexible to suite the Steam Deck's needs. Valve focused strongly on features like suspend and resume, heat mitigation, performance, and compatibility. AMD actually helped with suspend a resume quite a bit.

"Most of the work was actually more on the lower level OS side in collaboration with AMD. We've worked a ton on getting that stable but it's rock-solid now and we're really happy with where it's at," Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais said in an IGN interview.

"It came up in the earliest conversations with AMD, also with Steam developers internally. We needed to make sure that suspend and resume--just putting a game down and picking it back up--was something that was accommodated by the design of the system at the lowest level."

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The collaboration delivered a chip that can handle games like Cyberpunk 2077 at 30FPS in handheld mode.

Steam Deck news

• Valve testing ALL Steam games for Steam Deck compatibility
• Valve teams with AMD on getting Steam Deck to support Windows 11
• Steam Deck will have a built-in FPS limiter to help battery life
• Valve interested in making an upgraded Steam Deck in the future
• Valve: Gamers really shouldn't open their Steam Deck PC-handhelds
• Replacement SSDs 'could cause problems' in the Steam Deck, Valve warns
• Steam Deck's suspend and resume feature was a top priority for Valve
• Steam Deck reservations are now open to all Steam users
• Steam Deck should run every Steam game at launch
• Scalpers selling Steam Deck reservations for up to $5,000 on eBay
• Valve's $399 Steamdeck handheld: a portable PC that plays Steam games
• Steam Deck uses an M.2 2230 SSD that's 'not intended for replacement'
• New Steam Deck 512GB pre-orders won't ship until Q3 2022
• Steam Deck can handle all Steam games performance-wise, even new ones