The Performance & Power Improvement Of Steam Deck OLED's 6nm APU

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Performance & Power Improvement Of Steam Deck OLED's 6nm APU

The Steam Deck OLED has been on the test bench the past few weeks at Phoronix. The HDR OLED display of the updated Steam Deck handheld game console is gorgeous and was very impressed by it. On a technical level the battery life improvements are significant and one of the items I was most curious about were the power/performance implications in moving from the 7nm Van Gogh APU to a 6nm die shrink version of it while retaining the Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 integrated graphics. Here's a look at the performance and CPU power consumption between the Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED models not only for gaming but other Linux workloads too.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/steam-deck-oled-benchmarks

[fong38]

Would've been neat to see thermals as well but it's a good benchmark regardless. Personally I'm already pretty happy with my LCD model and with the (for me) only appealing additions being the oled screen and bigger battery I might just hold out until the Deck 2.

[stormcrow]

If you intend to keep your Deck more than a couple of years, you should go with LCD. Yes moving pixels help with burn-in, but what Q/OLED producers don't want you to know, is that the whole panel degrades over time because it's made from inherently unstable organic components (unstable meaning they break down in the order of months - faster the more they're used moving pixels or not). While LCDs tend to do this gracefully by simply dimming over years, OLEDs change color over time, because the blues will degrade first. If you're like me and keep monitors (or any given device with built in displays - I have a laptop from the Sandy Bridge era still) for 5+ years or so, avoid OLEDs.

[X_m7]

I think it'd be interesting to see how the 6nm and 7nm APUs compare at lower TDP settings too, in my case I don't mind low quality settings and framerates anywhere near as much with the Deck's small screen so I tend to push them down as far as I can go, and as a result my Deck ends up being configured to run at 7W TDP or under most of the time.

Although I'm guessing that might be hard to test outside of gaming mode? Don't think I've seen anything on how to change the TDP limit in desktop mode without resorting to using root access at least.

[Namelesswonder]

If you intend to keep your Deck more than a couple of years, you should go with LCD. Yes moving pixels help with burn-in, but what Q/OLED producers don't want you to know, is that the whole panel degrades over time because it's made from inherently unstable organic components (unstable meaning they break down in the order of months - faster the more they're used moving pixels or not). While LCDs tend to do this gracefully by simply dimming over years, OLEDs change color over time, because the blues will degrade first. If you're like me and keep monitors (or any given device with built in displays - I have a laptop from the Sandy Bridge era still) for 5+ years or so, avoid OLEDs.

Now this is a bit of FUD.

While yes it is true that OLEDs will degrade over time, when it comes to portable devices you have to be intentionally trying to damage the display for you to begin degrading it at an elevated rate. The thermal and power constraints of a portable device do not lend themselves to being able to drive the panel hard for long periods of time. This is something that OLED monitors do not have due to them chasing spec sheet numbers which lends to them driving the panel very hard and degrading it in short time. RTINGs ongoing test on OLED panels has shown that OLED TVs are pretty resilient to degradation. Just use the device as intended with downtime in between use and it'll last; well as long as it isn't a TV from Sony or a gaming OLED monitor, both of which make no attempt at trying to preserve themselves.

Battery life is paramount on a portable, so you're not going to be running the device at a brightness well beyond what is needed in the environment you are in, and you're going to have a brightness timeout or sleep timeout because again, there is battery powering it. Letting the device drain the battery while you're not using it does not make a good portable. Bob from Wulff Den has been running a Switch OLED at maximum brightness on a still image for over 18000 consecutive hours. While the display has degraded, it is not apparent while playing games, and requires displaying colors at brightness levels that make degradation obvious, which UIs and games typically do not use. It should be said that at 18000 hours you would have to play for 8 hours a day, every day, for over 6 years, and that the buttons/thumbsticks/battery will probably fail due to heavy use well before the screen does. Besides, the Deck OLED's screen is removable from the front, you can easily remove and replace the screen without having to disassemble it entirely from the back to the front like the Deck LCD.

LCDs aren't impervious either, the progression of time affects all, and consumer goods are not built with longevity in mind. Take a look at your stored devices that are 15 to 20 years old, like him you might find that they did not fare so well even with no usage. You will also find that your devices that are currently 10 years old may suffer the same fates in a few years too.

I should add that my LG C1 65 that I acquired second hand has over 12000 hours on it, and it does not have any apparent degradation on it. I have an OLED phone from 2016 that I have used every day since it came out and the only degradation that it has is the adhesive between the panel and glass yellowing due to me having to open the device to replace the bloated battery (and then the replacement too!) and with me never bothering to properly seal the device back up the adhesive has begun to oxidize. On the flip side my DSi XL from 2009 which I did not put that many hours on has begun to have uneven yellowing between the screens, leading to differing color temperature between them. The sealed-in-box unused OLED PS Vita I bought was manufactured over a decade ago, yet to my dismay even though it had literally zero use the panel degraded and at low brightness splotches appear. Things don't last forever, the LCD and OLED Decks will probably have similar longevity.

[Eirikr1848]

If you intend to keep your Deck more than a couple of years, you should go with LCD. Yes moving pixels help with burn-in, but what Q/OLED producers don't want you to know, is that the whole panel degrades over time because it's made from inherently unstable organic components (unstable meaning they break down in the order of months - faster the more they're used moving pixels or not). While LCDs tend to do this gracefully by simply dimming over years, OLEDs change color over time, because the blues will degrade first. If you're like me and keep monitors (or any given device with built in displays - I have a laptop from the Sandy Bridge era still) for 5+ years or so, avoid OLEDs.

Modern OLEDs do not face burn in as quickly as other panels do.

The other good thing about the steam deck is that the panel is relatively easily replaced if it comes to it.

[user556]

LCDs have burn-in too. In fact the so-called HDR LCDs will be the worst type of LCD for this. The LEDs in the backlighting still need to use phosphors to get the right colour balance just like OLED does, just like CRTs did, just like Fluorescents did, just like Plasmas did.

[Teggs]

The 6nm APU is effectively just a die shrink with the new Steam Deck will having four Zen 4 cores (8 threads)...

I was going to point out the typo on Zen generation, but there is a bit of grammatical confusion as well.

[ET3D]

Would have loved to see a frame time graph for Cyberpunk 2077. I find it strange that both min and max for the OLED are significantly higher but the average is slightly lower.

[Mathias]

Does anyone find it strange that while the OLED has a lower power consumption during tests, between tests it pulls sometimes 2-5W more then the LCD. It is this significant, that the OLED actually uses (slightly) more Joule per run on Superposition and Gravitymark.

The only benchmark where the OLED can really shine is the Embree benchmark, where OLED is 5% faster while using 4% less power resulting in ~10% less Joules per run. Oddly enough, this benchmark has two different power consumption graphs...?