Valve to Organize Steam Deck Developer Day, Will Showcase AMD’s Van Gogh APU

Here’s an interesting bit of news: Valve will organize a Steamworks Virtual Conference that will give developers an in-depth look at Steam Deck’s internals and (perhaps most importantly) the highly anticipated Van Gogh APU (RNDA 2) that’ll be housed within its enclosure!

This is all mighty exciting as RDNA 2-based iGPUs are expected to serve as quite a boon to budget gaming. We know for a fact that they’ll bring a huge performance uplift over existing Vega integrated graphics cards, but we’ve yet to see them in action. Interestingly enough, Valve’s Steam Deck will be the very first device on the market that’ll feature an RDNA 2 iGPU, so there’s a pretty big reason to eagerly await its release.

This conference is scheduled for November 12th, and will be open to all members of the Steamworks developer program.

Steam Deck Developer Conference| A Lot to Look Forward To

As expected, one of the biggest topics will be an “APU deep dive with AMD” that’ll provide developers with a lot more information into Steam Deck’s oh-so-interesting chipset. Seeing how it’ll produce up to 2 teraflops of computational performance, it could be about as powerful as an Xbox One and PlayStation 4. There are other factors at play, of course, but one thing’s for certain: these RDNA 2-based APUs will pack a punch!

This particular Van Gogh APU (according to one industry insider who has had the privilege of testing it out in person) will deliver an up to +50% performance increase over Vega which, in short, is simply astounding. Such a big leap is basically the difference between “barely playable” and “wholly enjoyable.” Existing Vega iGPUs are already perfectly sufficient for light esports gaming, but they’re just not powerful enough for more graphically demanding titles like Apex Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone (to say nothing of full-fledged AAA titles). A 50% jump in FPS would definitely go a long way towards changing that.

All in all, there’s a very concrete reason to be excited about this Steam Deck related conference ⁠— regardless if you’re a developer or not! We’ll be back with more coverage in just a few days, so stay tuned!