Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.
Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.
So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.
Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.
Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.
So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.