The Steam Deck Can Manage Path Tracing At 30 FPS

Path Tracing and Ray Tracing is very demanding, so much so that DLSS is almost a necessity for it even on some of the most powerful GPUs. Naturally you would assume that this would be something that an APU won’t be able to do for a good many more years but surprisingly the Steam Deck can manage albeit with an inconsistent 30 FPS.

Steam Deck PathTracing

A video uploaded by NightSightProductions shows off the Steam Deck playing Portal RTX at a playable 30 FPS. This was achieved by disabling the secondary bounces which enables a 30 FPS frame rate though at a low overall quality that ensures that this is nothing more than an example of what the Steam Deck could do.

The Steam Deck is powered by a 7nm AMD APU featuring 4C/8T with speeds up to 3.5GHz, the GPU alongside this features 8 RDNA 2 CUs at 1.6GHz. The Steam Deck uses the weakest APU on the handheld market at the moment but it is also the cheapest PC handheld option available. All of this just goes to show how far APUs have come, some of the newer ones are perfectly capable for strong gaming experiences within smaller and more budget form factors.