Gaming laptops run the same version of Windows as any other PC and maintain compatibility with a vast library of games available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, GOG, and Ubisoft Connect, among others. Performance Winner: Gaming Laptop Steam Deck vs. Most new games that target a cross-platform release (on PC, Xbox Series S|X, and PlayStation 5) will perform much worse on the Steam Deck than on a budget gaming laptop. This will only get you so far, however, as the quad-core processor is a major bottleneck that can tank performance in modern games. It’s possible to claw back some performance if you switch to a lower display resolution than the Steam Deck’s native 1,200 x 800, or with a frame reconstruction technique such as AMD’s FideltyFX Super Resolution (FSR). The Deck can handle older or better optimized titles, like Borderlands 3 and Hitman 3, but can choke on notorious system-killers, like Metro Exodus or Horizon: Zero Dawn. In short, the Steam Deck’s performance is miles off that of a budget gaming laptop, and it frequently struggles to play demanding games at acceptable frame rates. That’s slightly behind a laptop with Intel Iris Xe graphics, which scored 1,837, and way behind a budget gaming laptop with Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics, which scored 3,764. IGN's Steam Deck review tested its capabilities with the 3DMark Time Spy gaming benchmark, which hit a score of 1,715. Performance varies widely, of course, but even the least capable gaming laptops are roughly as powerful as the Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck’s APU is restricted to a mere 15 watts of power-at stock settings, at least. The integrated Radeon GPU has eight RDNA 2 Compute Units, equivalent to those found in many Ryzen laptop APUs. It includes a four-core, eight-thread CPU based on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, which also appears in numerous Ryzen 4000 and Ryzen 5000 mobile processors (and some Ryzen 7000 models, too). The Steam Deck always ships with the same, slightly customized AMD APU. Maximum power draw can be extremely high, with the most powerful gaming laptops exceeding 250 watts at load. Modern gaming laptops also ship with Intel Core and AMD Ryzen processors that, in most cases, have at least eight cores. Gaming laptops are available in numerous configurations and sizes that range from bottom-barrel budget devices with AMD or Intel integrated graphics to high-end models with powerful GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30/40 series and AMD’s Radeon RX 6000M line.

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