A YouTuber has posted a 10-minute video detailing the steps wanted to hook a Steam Deck console as much as an exterior graphics card.
Whereas the setup basically robs the hand-held gaming system of any portability–unless you’ve got received actually massive palms that may maintain each a Steam Deck and a GPU–it does present a considerable enhance in efficiency.
ETA Prime opened up the Steam Deck and eliminated the SSD storage from its M.2 growth slot, changing it with a Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU. After connecting the GPU to an adapter to make it match, an exterior energy provide was added and a replica of Home windows 11 saved on a MicroSD card was utilized in tandem with video games that had been saved on an exterior SSD that was related through USB-C.
The top outcome noticed The Witcher III operating at a 4K decision on its highest graphical settings, with as much as 108 frames per second. A later check of GTA V noticed that recreation hit 70fps on 4K with excessive settings enabled as properly.
The most important hurdle in pushing the Steam Deck to its restrict though–as ETA Prime discovered out–is its inner CPU. Regardless of how highly effective the GPU connected to it, video games will all the time attain a bottleneck of efficiency as a result of 4-core and 8-thread AMD Zen 2 CPU. ETA Prime demonstrated this by displaying Elden Ring operating at max settings on 1080p decision whereas hitting 46fps.
Whereas the experiment was achieved for the sake of doing it, ETA Prime really useful that Steam Deck customers keep away from attaching an exterior GPU to their programs and moderately get pleasure from it for the transportable gaming expertise that it was designed for.
In different Steam Deck information, a current firmware replace has made offline mode extra handy and Xbox Cloud streaming is now supported by the Edge browser.
In GameSpot’s Steam Deck evaluation, Alessandro Barbosa referred to as the gadget a “splendidly constructed and highly effective transportable PC.” Preorders of the Steam Deck are at present going out in waves, with the second wave slated to start rolling out in April.
