Since the announcement of Steam Deck On the part of Valve, comparisons with other portable consoles have been inevitable, especially with its main competitor in the market: the Aya Neo Next. On this occasion, a new round of benchmarks comparing both consoles, in this case with titles like Elden Ring, God of War or ForzaHorizon 5where Steam Deck once again shows not only better, but also stronger performance.
The new generation of portable consoles is already among us, as Valve has already begun to ship the first units of its long-awaited Steam Deck console (and, it must be said, in batches so small that they have already given rise to speculators, selling it very cheaply). above the price it has cost them). For its part, the Aya Neo Next is a console that has already shown excellent performance, but whose price makes it less attractive than Valve’s hardware.
The hardware difference in Steam Deck and Aya Neo Next
Both portable consoles mount a amd processor: a custom APU named Van Gogh in the case of the Valve console, and a Ryzen 5000 SoC (Cezanne) in the case of the Aya Neo Next. Both CPUs come out of TSMC’s 7nm node, and yet AMD’s recipe differs quite a bit in both chips, which is why they have different performance in games, although it is true that RAM also contributes to this difference (the Steam Deck carries 16 GB LPDDR5 at 5,500MHz per 16 GB LPDDR4 at 4,667 MHz in the Aya Neo Next).
The chip inside Valve’s Steam Deck is called Aerith, and contains four Zen 2 cores with eight process threads thanks to SMT technology, running at a base speed of 2.4 GHz and reaching 3.5 GHz in Boost mode. For its part, the Ryzen 7 5800U that carries the Aya Neo Next has 8 Zen 3 cores and 16 process threads at a base speed of 1.9 GHz but reaching 4.4 GHz in boost mode, so in essence the “brain” of Valve’s console is quite inferior. However, it must also be taken into account that the TDP Aerith’s is between 4-15W per 10-25W cTDP of the Ryzen 7 5800U.
Finally, keep in mind that although the Aya Neo Next’s processor is substantially superior to that of the Steam Deck, Valve’s console uses AMD’s latest RDNA 2 solution with 8 compute units at 1.6 GHz, while the processor of the Aya Neo Next has Vega integrated graphics at 2 GHz, so in this aspect the Valve console should be better.
Steam Deck vs Aya Neo Next in Elden Ring, God of War and more
The YouTuber ETA PRIME has been one of the first to have both consoles in his hands, and fortunately he has decided to compare them so that the rest of the users can see the real performance in games. In this case he has carried out his tests at a resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels, with the graphics settings set to low and the FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) function enabled in games that support it. Steam Deck was tested using SteamOS except for Forza Horizon 5, where he decided to switch to Windows to see its performance; Aya Neo Next always ran on Windows 10.
From this video we can extract very interesting data, such as the fact that the Steam Deck worked better in God of War even when the Chinese console worked at its maximum with a consumption of 28W. In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the Steam Deck was again superior except when the Aya Neo Next was set to maximum consumption, while in Forza Horizon 5, both consoles showed a fairly similar performance.
The most curious thing has been Elden Ring, the hot game at the moment, where the Steam Deck showed a pretty decent performance at 37-44 FPS for the 31-40 FPS of the Aya Neo Next (16W), but was outclassed again when set to 28W (34-51 FPS). And we have to keep in mind that, according to Valve, some titles like Elden Ring work better on the Steam Deck because they have optimized the console for it.
