Interesting that it uses a dedicated 9070 (ugh that name), rather than being a custom APU, like the other AMD consoles and the deck. Surely this just adds cost and design complexity.
That said, perhaps they’re being cautious - if you can’t sell a lot of them, a custom APU isn’t worth it. It’s also probably much faster to bring to market if you’re using off-the-shelf parts.
If you want to sell a Steam console, it has to do 4k pretty well, because that’s what TVs have these days. An APU won’t cut it for that, you’ll need a discrete GPU.
Also, Valve has done driver work on plenty of things that they don’t use in their own hardware, from various AMD cards, Intel graphics, and even work on the open source Nvidia drivers
Valve developers are the main contributors to the RADV Vulkan driver so they’ve done work on pretty much every AMD card that supports Vulkan. So yeah, pretty silly rumour if that’s the evidence.
Like I said, it’s likely cheaper if you’re not going to sell many units, but if you can recoup the design costs through selling a decent amount, it can easily become cheaper.
Less in the way of packaging costs, fewer VRMs and other power circuitry, a less advanced cooling setup, and – probably most critically – you only need one pool of memory, not dedicated RAM for the CPU and separate VRAM for the GPU.
Interesting that it uses a dedicated 9070 (ugh that name), rather than being a custom APU, like the other AMD consoles and the deck. Surely this just adds cost and design complexity.
That said, perhaps they’re being cautious - if you can’t sell a lot of them, a custom APU isn’t worth it. It’s also probably much faster to bring to market if you’re using off-the-shelf parts.
If you want to sell a Steam console, it has to do 4k pretty well, because that’s what TVs have these days. An APU won’t cut it for that, you’ll need a discrete GPU.
Not a laptop-class one, no. That’s why I said custom. A PS5 Pro uses an APU and is more powerful than most people’s desktops.
Valve developers are the main contributors to the RADV Vulkan driver so they’ve done work on pretty much every AMD card that supports Vulkan. So yeah, pretty silly rumour if that’s the evidence.
I’d say it’s the opposite - it’s just a small form factor PC with off the shelf components
Like I said, it’s likely cheaper if you’re not going to sell many units, but if you can recoup the design costs through selling a decent amount, it can easily become cheaper.
Less in the way of packaging costs, fewer VRMs and other power circuitry, a less advanced cooling setup, and – probably most critically – you only need one pool of memory, not dedicated RAM for the CPU and separate VRAM for the GPU.
RAM is dirt cheap lately, so I don’t think it would make sense to design entire custom circuitry to save on that
It absolutely would. 16GB of VRAM and another 16GB of system RAM adds up. Plus the other associated costs.
The rumour is nonsense and Valve isn’t making a console with a 9070.