The hype (and market) for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck continues to grow. Speaking as part of a panel held during CES 2025, AMD’s Frank Azor, Microsoft’s Jason Ronald, and Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais talked through their different perspectives on the popularity of the Steam Deck, its many rivals and the unique challenges that come with a more compact form-factor.
According to Azor, AMD's involvement as the chip-maker behind the hardware inside most of the handheld gaming PCs out there might seem obvious from the outside. However, in reality, it was as much a natural extension of the work it had been doing with desktop and laptop PCs for decades as it was a culmination of several different tech trends and advancements.
“The other thing that had to come together is our software technologies and our upscaling technollogies — like our Fidelity Effect, super resolution and our AMD fluid bush and flames technology," he said.
Azor said that these technologies offer the ability to improve performance without also increasing the amount of power or silicon involved. He also pointed to the unique that role that breakthroughs in generative AI have had in enabling leaner hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go to be more viable when it comes to performance.
“What’s starting to evolve is that we’re starting to generate pixels by using AI technologies and in many cases we can generate those pixels more efficiently than we would by throwing traditional compute at that challenge,” he said.
Essentially, and put by Azor, this enables AMD to offer better "perceived" performance without having to “burden the platform” with more power consumption.
“With form-factors like PC handhelds power consumption is one of the most critical factors. Even more so than a gaming laptop because you’re working with a smaller battery and you have weight constraints [ and] you have size constraints," he said.
While Intel wasn’t mentioned by name during the panel, it’s clear that Azor doesn’t really see them as a real competitor when it comes to this corner of the PC market.
“There is no other x86 class processor, which is what you want to work across the entire library of PC games that are out there, that has the kind of CPU performance, the kind of graphics performance and the kind of software support and upscaling support that AMD is able to deliver,” he said.
The other highlight of the panel was the perspective offered by Griffais offered in relationship to how Valve sees AI. In the past, the company's relationship with AI in relation to Steam has been a source of controversy. Despite, Griffais said the relationship between AI and SteamOS is more straightforward by comparison.
“On the OS side, we tend to work back from what we see users doing and what we see game developers doing," he said.
"If we working with a bunch of platforms that have onboard inference hardware on their silicon and there’s a bunch of games that make use of that hardware, we’ll always want to be doing work so that you have great driver support for all of the features to be available out of the box and using the best performance and power efficiency,” he said.
Another interest insight from the event was that all three panelists more-or-less aligned on the relationship between the handheld PC segment and the rest of the gaming market as complementary rather than competitive.
“The vast majority of players today play across multiple devices. They don’t only play on PC or only on console," Ronald said.
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