Valve’s Steam Deck fixes the major issue that impacts all of AMD’s integrated graphics chips

For the past decade, AMD’s APUs, CPUs with Integrated Graphics, have long suffered from memory bandwidth issues, as two channels of DDR3/DDR4 memory is often not enough to power AAA games at high settings. Thankfully, Valve’s Steam Deck appears to have bypassed this potential problem. 

Valve has updated the specifications page of its Steam Deck website to confirm that the handheld will feature 16GB of LPDDR5 memory that operates in a quad-channel configuration at 5500MT/s. That’s four 32-bit LPDDR5 memory channels, a factor that gives Valve’s Steam Deck more memory bandwidth than any of AMD’s older integrated graphics solutions. 

Valve’s Steam Deck system should avoid being bandwidth starved thanks to this memory setup, given the system’s relatively low 1280 x 800 resolution. Valve’s Steam Deck specifications also give their handheld console more bandwidth per GPU TFLOP than all of the latest consoles, which is good news for PC gamers. 

If there is one thing that we can say about Valve’s Steam Deck, it’s that they did not skip on the unit’s memory configuration. 16GB of LPDDR5 in a quad-channel configuration will deliver more than enough bandwidth for modern PC titles, though only time will tell how this setup will stand the test of time.    

While the memory bandwidth of Valve’s Steam Deck will need to play double duty as both CPU and GPU memory, the same can be said for all modern gaming consoles. In terms of hardware specifications, Valve’s Steam Deck stands head and shoulders above Nintendo’s Switch, offering gamers much newer hardware and support for the latest GPU features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders and more.