Steam Deck Developer Unit Benchmarks Leak, Shows 60 FPS is Doable

Remember those early developer units of the Steam Deck that Valve was shipping out to developers? Well, one of them ended up in the hands of someone in China, who decided to share a few benchmarks on a local forum. Judging by the pictures posted, Valve still has a lot of work to do when it comes to the translation of the UI, but this shouldn’t affect anyone using it in English.

The hardware appears to function according to the announced specs, so there were no surprises here, good or bad. Only four games were tested, which consists of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Doom, Cyberpunk 2077 and DOTA 2. Let’s just say that Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t going to be what you want to play on the Steam Deck, as it was fluctuating between 20 to 30 FPS, although this was at the high quality setting.

The other games were faring much better, with DOTA 2 averaging around 47 FPS at high quality and hitting 80 FPS when set to low quality. DOOM managed around 60 FPS using the medium quality preset, but a higher quality setting dropped this down to 46 FPS. Finally Shadow of the Tomb Raider seemed to run quite well, all things considered, delivering 36 FPS using the built-in benchmarking tool, while tweaking the graphics setting allowed it to hit 60 FPS. It would appear that Valve’s 30 FPS target might be set somewhat on the low side, but it obviously depends on how willing people will be when it comes to compromising on image quality. The question is also how much a higher quality setting will matter on a 7-inch display.