Next-generation Steam Deck Competitors to Receive Significant Performance Upgrade: A Much-Needed Boost for Handheld Gaming Devices

The handheld market could potentially experience a much-needed transformation if AMD’s advertised performance numbers prove to be true.

Despite the significant growth of the gaming handheld market following the launch of the Steam Deck, most devices share a common feature – the 7840U 780M chip combination. This chipset can be found in popular handhelds such as the Ayaneo Slide and Flip DS, as well as the AMD Z1 Extreme which powers the Asus ROG Ally, albeit in a slightly different form.

Only a handful of handheld devices, including the MSI Claw and Ayn Odin 2, have deviated from the traditional hardware, as MSI has experimented with Intel’s latest Arc graphics technology and Ayn has opted for a Snapdragon 8 CPU.

It’s not surprising that most people prefer to use the Steam Deck. Other options are essentially just variations of the same thing. This lack of excitement is especially evident when considering that many competitors of the Steam Deck come with the bulky Windows 11 OS.

The introduction of the Ryzen AI HX 370 may bring about significant changes. AMD unveiled the new APU at Computex 2024, however, no performance data was provided.

Nevertheless, during a presentation of their new ‘Duo OLED’ laptop, Chinese manufacturer GPD unintentionally disclosed some figures for the APU that powers the device.

According to the leak from Videocardz, the Ryzen AI HX 370 is able to achieve similar single-core performance to the Ryzen 9 7950X in Cinebench 2024 benchmarks, while surpassing the Ryzen 9 5950X in multicore tasks.

The Radeon 890M integrated within the APU has shown a 36% increase in gaming performance compared to the Radeon 780M.

This marks a significant improvement, as its graphical capabilities would bring it close to the level of robust, dedicated graphics cards such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 and 3050.

As we have witnessed, manufacturers and developers have managed to achieve impressive outcomes with the 7840U 780M in handheld setups. This is particularly evident when combined with efficient cooling and effective optimization. Keeping this in mind, the potential of the next generation of handheld hardware is truly fascinating.

It is already quite impressive to have a complete gaming setup that can easily fit into a glove compartment, and it will only be even more impressive if measures can be taken to minimize power usage and heat generation.