How will it be possible to connect the Steam Deck to a graphics card? Or conversely, how do you connect any graphics card to a Steam Deck? It’s not exactly an exercise in technique, but it’s quite plausible for any user who has the skills and the minimum knowledge on the subject. Does it improve performance? Or on the contrary, does it deteriorate the gaming experience?
Steam Deck and your PC graphics, how is this possible?
Many questions raised and few answers, but concise. As we know, the Steam Deck comes with an AMD APU, so it curiously l acks a Thunderbolt port that would allow, with a simple cable and an adapter or external box, to connect our GPU in a simple and colorful way, said console with the graphics card of our PC and with it we would increase performance in just 5 minutes.
By having exclusively a USB-C interface, this option is excluded for not implementing said video and energy interface as such, therefore the option to achieve what we are discussing goes through only one: removing the M.2 SSD connected to interface PCIe 3.0 x4 and connect our GPU to it through a specific adapter that integrates a PCB with the PCIe 3.0 x16 connector (or 4.0 if it matters, although it will be unnecessary due to the restrictions of the bus and its lines) and where our graphics will be connected.
But there is an obvious problem, if we remove the SSD, how do we load the console OS? Well, it takes some ingenuity and running it from a microSD to be able to close the loop and enjoy better performance, right?
An RX 6900 XT boosts the performance of the AMD SoC
Nothing less than an RX 6900 XT literally plugged into a Steam Deck even though the interface is going to limit performance but it was worth the experience to understand where the bottlenecks are and how bad they are can squeeze SoC cores to gaming performance.
The data is quite interesting, as it ensures a 5.5x increase in iGPU performance in 3DMark FireStrike with noticeable increases in FPS in games. To be more specific, it is reported that approximately 100 frames per second in The Witcher 3 in ultra low resolution 4Kbut if we move on to more current titles like Cyberpunk 2077 the Elden Ring in 1080p in the best possible frameworks that we will have between 40 and 50 FPS.
Seeing this data and assuming the guys at Steam thought the same at the time and tried it, knowing at the same time that the new AMD SoCs already allow USB4 For external graphics cards, will the new Steam Deck have this ability to plug in a PC graphics card to increase performance?
It would be a new type of high-performance dock mode that would greatly improve FPS and simulate what Nintendo did with Switch, but in a brutal way and boost the concept of a handheld console incredibly.
