It looks as if the Steam Deck has dominated the PC gaming house for the final 12 months, regardless of operating on comparatively previous Zen 2 {hardware}. The incontrovertible fact that this brick-sized gadget can run the newest 3D PC video games in any respect is fairly exceptional and a testomony to the stunning versatility of AMD’s APU designs. But what if the corporate constructed a brand new sequence of chips designed from the bottom up for this new, super-compact transportable type issue? It has. Say hey to the Ryzen Z1, which can make its retail product debut in the Asus ROG Ally.

The Z1 and Z1 Extreme are designed with the distinctive necessities of super-portable gaming in thoughts, optimizing each graphical functionality and battery life over multitasking or CPU-focused duties. Both are primarily based on the Zen 4 structure of AMD’s newest desktop and laptop computer chips with the RDNA 3 graphics system. The Z1 boasts six major cores and 12 threads, with 4 RDNA 3 compute models. The Z1 excessive will get a modest bump to eight cores and 16 threads, however triples the RDNA 3 models to 12 to actually pump out these polygons. Cache is 22MB and 24MB, respectively, and each processors assist AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution, Image Sharpening, AMD Link streaming, and Radeon Chill energy saving options.

But the true numbers that players care about are the in-game benchmarks. According to a promotional slide from AMD, the Z1 can deal with 138 frames-per-second in Counter-Strike: GO at 1080p—about the identical degree as a funds or mid-range gaming desktop, relying on the settings. The Z1 Extreme can pump out 162 frames. A extra demanding single-player sport like Red Dead Redemption 2 goes to hit the {hardware} quite a bit more durable, but it surely’s nonetheless very playable at 25 and 48 frames, respectively. Forza Horizon 4, a comparatively well-optimized sport that nonetheless advantages from larger framerates, is clocked at 83 FPS for the Z1 and a powerful 122 FPS for the Z1 Extreme.

AMD

What concerning the different aspect of the equation, energy consumption? That’s more durable to pin down. According to our hands-on with the Asus ROG Ally, it’s getting about the identical two hours of heavy 3D gaming battery life because the Steam Deck on its a lot older chips…however we don’t know the relative dimension of the batteries in play. The ROG Ally can be using some fairly fancy engineering in its twin fan cooling system. Based on these preliminary numbers, I’d estimate that even when the Z1 and Z1 Extreme are an enormous step up in graphical functionality, they gained’t be fixing the battery life weaknesses of those handheld PCs any time quickly.

The ROG Ally will get a full public debut on May eleventh, although exact retail launch and pricing isn’t obtainable in the intervening time. Since Zen 2-based handheld PCs got here out of the woodwork after the Steam Deck’s launch final 12 months, you’ll be able to anticipate the same glut of Z1-powered devices from a wide range of distributors within the latter half of 2023.