Steam Deck User Manages to Attach an AMD Graphics Card For 4K Output

gamerant.com:

It's been a few weeks since the Steam Deck released, and many gamers have been getting to grips with the device. Recently, Valve has been looking for user feedback so it can continue to work on the handheld system, especially when it comes to the games themselves. One of the machine's biggest selling points is the fact that it's essentially a fully functional PC that can be used on the go, giving it a bit of an edge in the mobile market. However, one modder wondered what would happen if it could be given the strength of an external desktop graphics card.

In a video uploaded to YouTube a couple of days ago, the ETA PRIME channel decided to see what would happen if the Steam Deck was given some different graphics hardware. In this case, it's been attached to an AMD Radeon 6900 XT, a card that is almost one and half times as big as Valve's device itself. While it makes the portable console less wieldy in that it needs to be physically hooked up to the beastly GPU, the aim was to see whether it would have an impact on game performance.

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When hooked up using the device's built-in M.2 and connecting it to a PCI-E dock, the 6900 XT gives a fairly significant boost to framerate during play. However, the performance overall is bottle necked by the Steam Deck's CPU, meaning that it's unable to unleash the full power of the graphics card. That being said, games like The Witcher 3 and GTA 5 do show a marked fps improvement on 4K outputs. But in games like Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077, there doesn't appear to be much of a boost. But, again, this is likely due to the CPU.

Given that the Steam Deck now has over 2000 verified or playable games, the main attribute that users