Steam Deck vs. Switch: Comparing the Best Gaming Handhelds
Comparisons between the Valve Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch are hard to avoid—but not always helpful. They’re very different devices with very different philosophies, and they’re both great. Here’s a rundown of what you need to know.
The Nintendo Switch and Valve Steam Deck share a lot of similarities, but there are some big differences in terms of overall power and performance. The Switch was released in early 2017 and is powered by the NVIDIA Tegra X1 system-on-chip (SoC) running at 1.02GHz, with a total of 4GB LPDDR4 RAM.
Its NVIDIA Maxwell-based GPU runs between 307 and 768MHz, depending on whether you’re playing in portable or docked mode. On-board storage takes the form of 32 or 64 GB of eMMC flash memory, which delivers roughly the same performance as the microSD expansion card slot (around 95MB/sec, which is why expensive microSD cards won’t improve Switch performance).
In contrast, the Steam Deck saw release in early 2022, a full five years later than the Switch. It’s powered by a custom AMD accelerated processing unit (APU) that’s based on Zen 2 (CPU) and RDNA 2 (GPU) architectures, the same technology that helped build the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. The CPU runs between 2.4 and 3.5 GHz, and the system has access to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.
Valve has compared the GPU capabilities of the Steam Deck to that of the Radeon RX 6000 series, running between 1 and 1.6 GHz. The base Steam Deck uses similar eMMC flash memory as the Switch but employs the faster PCI Express 2.0 x1 standard (up to 500MB/sec). The mid and upper tiers use faster NVMe-based SSDs for improved read and write times.
The Steam Deck enjoys higher clock speeds, newer CPU and GPU architectures, a larger pool of RAM, and faster storage options than the
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