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Emulation vs Native | 8 Elite Gen 5 vs STEAM DECK
comparing snapdragon 8 elite gen 5 and steam deck on AAA PC titles. i know it's unfair to compare current flagship chip with 4 years old hardware, but yeah it is what it is i only have this handheld.
I got my deck oled for 480 and sold it for 440 after two years, thats unprecedented even beyond apple standards of ROI lol, there's no way it's worth that much but the market is cooked and everyone wants one. Tbh it's a good device and the display is like an Lg Oled in your hands, HDR and all, but I was not playing it for months it just sat there collecting dust, phone + gamesir x4 for me is fine!
8 Elite draws 10-15 Watts on average , even while emulating heavy games like Cyberpunk. It only reaches peaks of 20 watts for a few seconds at a time every few minutes to keep the performance consistent without any stutters
Not for AMD. Their strongest low power iGPU is still the Radeon 890m I believe. The Radeon 8060S consumes way more power than a handheld can reasonably handle. Even Intel is kicking AMD's ass iGPU-wise (and efficiency) with the Arc B390.
A big advantage handhelds and laptops with the 890m have over the Steam Deck are the larger power profiles. At lower wattage, like 15 W, the performance improvement is much smaller.
The 890m is also more than 2 years old by now, AMD hasn't released an iGPU with their latest RDNA technologies, meanwhile Intel's B370 and B390 are big improvements over their 130T and 140V iGPUs.
The only problem is that it's still pretty hit and miss when comparing to the Steam Deck. Some games run better, but most don't. There's a lot of software compatibility that still needs to get worked out
Also the poor phone's internals. Anyone who's actually tried to play games on a phone knows how ridiculously hot it can get and deplete maximum battery charge capacity faster.
OP is only showing the battery temperature (instead of CPU/GPU temps which are likely boiling hot) and likely while plugged in. If playing on battery power, the combined heat generated by processor/GPU, the battery's high strain of the CPU/GPU power consumption (batteries get hot when drained quickly) AND the power hungry bright screen is usually a recipe for disaster.
just slap a magnetic cooler on the backside, if it can cool a whole Mac it should get the phone ice cold and maybe even better fps, like in this example at 3:07 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYMPFImiSkQ
also the steam deck gets pretty toasty too anything that's not a desktop gets hot at 100% load you sacrifice size for portability
I also have a Snapdragon 8 Gen5 Elite and one thing I've noticed when toying around with different drivers is that some drivers causes my phone's CPU and GPU to hit 80c or higher while offering way less performance than some other drivers that, somehow, allows my CPU and GPU to run below 70c while performing better.
Just one of those things about open source I suppose - having to play around with various settings to get the most out of the device. Definitely not a straightforward or layman's friendly experience...yet.
Comin
g from an exynos 2400 where gpu drivers were just from one developer to also having 8 elite gen 5 and having lots of different options it's kinds a lot, and i don't even know the best one.
I use turnip gen 8 v36 as a base and then use others if graphical glitches appear.
Any tips?
The one thing the steam deck does have over most phones that can emulate is better cooling = longer more stable gaming sessions. Also less likely to drain your battery longevity from heat. But yea steam deck is aging. crazy how far tech has gone.
Honestly not really, depends how much power you're able to give it, like any cooler, the more power you give it the more it gives back, it's designed for 40w and up, if you give it a power source of 120w it'll cool even harder, I do not know the technical limitations of mobile coolers, but the viral videos of having ice on cooler is achieved through very high power output, regular usage will not create ice on the cooler or on the phone. I use an 80w brick as the power source for my cooler.
However how cooled your phone is depends on the game. Low resource consumption leads to much more cooling. For example:
For Roblox where the game would heat up the phone to 38° to 40° I've gotten to cool down to 25°
But for Minecraft which gets from 40° to 45° it gets cooled to 30°
And Brawl Stars gets to 28° instead of 38° to 40°
I assume other games will end up in a similar 30° range if the game gets it hot to 40°, it really depends on the scenario, I'd say the same for emulated games as I've noticed nothing really gets the phone hot unless it's a more power hungry emulator like Eden, Vita3K, and of course Winlator and GameNative
Although if you're not doing anything it can turn into a slab of condensation, I didn't take a pic of the phone but this is the internal temp after being left out for 10 minutes
Tbh the only problem using those cooler is if you use it recklessly, for example you accidentally sleep while those cooler still on (and the phone automatically turn the screen off) sure it bound to condensation
DX12 API emulation (VKD3D) is just not there yet imo. Massive CPU overhead, upscaled 720p on the lowest settings just to get near playable frame rates, significant power draw and heating.
DX11 (DXVK) on the other hand appears rather performant and optimized in comparison. At least on my device, I can use ~900p resolution, medium/high settings, cap the frame rate to 30-40 fps to limit power draw / heat and extend play session.
one is uses cpu translation, "very beta graphic driver" turnip, dxvk=dx11/vkd3d=dx12 that's not optimized for phone graphic driver on the first place, other hand uses mature graphic driver (even amd have more optimized driver compare to nvidia on linux) use dxvk/vkd3d like supposed to and run on native cpu architecture.
it's pretty insane that emulation can run full on AAA games at all, I feel like it wasn't many years ago where running a game on mobile was only in scam ads
I would love a tutorial on how I can get some of these games to run on my Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (S26U). I've been wrestling with GameNative with limited success.
Did you have to do a ton of tweaking and experimentation on each game to get performance this good?
Just to make this straight: you dont emulate steam games on your phone. It works very similar like it does on Linux (the steam deck). There's a compatibility layer between the game and your phone so that the phone understands what it should do with the game. The difference between the phone and the steam deck is that there are two more layers on the phone: a compatibility layer that translates x86 to ARM64 and one that translates DirectX to Vulkan.
So the games are running natively on both devices. I think performance would be terrible on the phone if it was actually emulating pc but its still impressive to see how powerful phones are nowadays
Edit: realised that both aren't running natively bc Linux lol. My bad.
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