Update for anyone asking about the possibility of an OLED upgrade - Right now there is no source for higher density chips for the OLED model. I've been told Micron will soon be making these chips available for sale soon. Also, I'll have links to all the parts I use with the Steam Decks - as well as some shops if you'd like to upgrade your Deck. Big thanks to Ridge for sponsoring this project and allowing me to pickup another Steam Deck for testing. Thanks again for watching.
The original memory was Hynix. I installed Samsung. I re-soldered the jumper. After this, there is no image on the built-in screen. There is an image via HDMI. The screen is intact. The screen cable is intact. What could be the problem? Flashing BIOS doesn't help
The original memory was Hynix. I installed Samsung. I re-soldered the jumper. After this, there is no image on the built-in screen. There is an image via HDMI. The screen is intact. The screen cable is intact. What could be the problem? Flashing BIOS doesn't help
I think for most cases you fix this issue with just having lower quality textures... In Cyberpunk I find it kind of absurd that it defaults to "high textures", when it is actually quite hard to appreciate that level of detail on 800p... I reduced the textures to medium and a lot of the stuttering disappeared. I don't always think that throwing more hardware at the problem is the right way to go. It's a balancing act. And I think most gamer's need to acknowledge that medium textures look really good on a Steam Deck. :)
I ordered a refurbished one for 299 euros. I think it's still a great option for the price. The oled version was to expensive for me, especially because I have a desktop computer at home that will do the majority of my gaming tasks
I did the research on how to upgrade the ram. it requires pulling off the ram modules off the main SOC and soldering in new RAM modules. No thanks. Ive pulled my steam deck down fully, replaced plates, cleaned the button contacts, replaced trigger springs, changed and swapped out SSDs and am a person who loves how easy it is to pull the SD down. But that? Nah son, if I have to solder in new RAM modules obtained from a questionable source id would rather wait for SD2
I'm talking about PC here but imo in -current year- EVERYONE should get 32gb of ram for gaming. I'm constantly surprised but how many games happily use more than 16gb when they have access to it. Also, using Hogwarts: Legacy is just cheating. That game will devour 32gb of ram and still have the audacity to crash regularly LOL
16gb should be enough just for gaming now, but normally we never have just the game running, we have other apps that eat the ram, so 32gb would be the safepot for now. For steamdeck, steamOS specifically where you can only be doing 1 thing at a time, 16gb ram is just fine.
Going 16 instead of 32 doesn't save a lot of money these days, so it almost doesn't make sense to just get 16GB. But purely from a technical perspective, it's far more useful to increase from 16 the 32 on a shared memory device like the Deck. On desktop the GPU will usually have its own memory and most games are fairly economical about system memory usage.
This was the first video I watched on this channel and boy this was refreshing. I love that It was simple and well organized. It reminds me of what PC videos were like back when I got into it, around the intel's 4th generation processors. I havent felt that since I got into PCs!
This is exactly the question I had when I started seeing these 32 GB mod videos. Thanks for taking the time to address these questions. Definitely interested in seeing how this affects desktop mode in RAM heavy apps and emulation. I'm also curious to see the effects of increasing the memory allocated to the GPU on the upgraded deck. Does the custom bios allow you to allocate more RAM than the default bios? And if it does, how does it affect performance and stability in games that can make use of the additional memory?
Star citizen, ARK ( old and new ) and heavily modded Skyrim and fallout 4 are the only games that come to mind that will greatly benefit from 32GB of ram. In most cases you’ll run out of VRAM way before system ram if you sticking with 16GB.
Finally video comparing the performance of Steam Decks was something I was curious about, seeing how the tuned version stacks up against the unmodified one
Excellent video! Been looking for info about this for a while! Would really love to see more comparisons (Especially modded Fallout!) and maybe even emulation.
it surprises me how the Steam Deck can struggle managing its 16GB of RAM, while the PS5 and Xbox Series X run the exact same amout like it's no deal, and before anyone says it's because power well that'd be even more reason for them to struggle even more since they're way more demanding which would also require way more RAM, specially in 4K where a TON of VRAM is required, like over 10GB, leaving even less for system, how do those ones manage their RAM
They don’t have separate isolated RAM and VRAM in traditional sense at all. Their GDDR6 video ram equally accessible to CPU and GPU at full speed at all times. Some very small amount are may be dedicated to strictly GPU / CPU but in general they use it as one big pool
PS5/Xbox games are optimized to those constraints and run almost in "bare metal" with little overhead. Steam deck games are "normal" PC games created using game engines designed to run in hundreds of PC configurations thus creating a ton of overhead. For the "outdated" specs, I would say the deck still holds very well thanks to its operating system being very lean. That's why I don't understand people installing windows on the deck to game, you're just putting even more constraints on the hardware by using it, at this point you might as well buy a laptop. That's also the reason why the decks competitors, while better in specs, all fail to sell as good as the deck. SteamOS is awesome for handheld gaming, you can install Bazzite but it's not really the same thing.
@@MrQuay03 Because after testing so many games on the Rog ally, working around the 16GB has been the biggest problem Ive had so far. Having a faster APU is nice but if its still bottle necked from not enough system ram, it wont make new games run that much better than the previous model.
Back when RAM was first introduced it was a game changer. That's because it allowed multi-tasking on computers. RAM hold the information of a program open. That's what RAM still is to this date. Adding more RAM to a device whose CPU/APU/GPU is "slow" won't make much of an impact. Video RAM holds shaders, but if the GPU/APU is not fast enough it won't be able to calculate the graphics in time. If you're playing a game with lots of action going on, the VRAM will hold it open BUT if the APU/GPU is slow, it will process each frame slowly which results in stuttering/lag. Adding more RAM seems like a cool thing if you intend on using the SteamDeck as a laptop replacement, but for gaming it'll do 0 to nothing. Awesome video regardless.
you should try comparing the 512gb and 1t b of storage, thats if it's even possible for you within your budget, I'm curious about buying one myself but with like lots of storage personally for me
you should have tested games that are known for being a problem with 16GB like avatar: frontiers of pandora and alan wake 2 or maybe crunk texture up in some recent AAA, usually if u have enough vram/ram high texture is a free visual upgrade.
I tried upgrading my laptop ram to 32GB and unfortunalty the videos on youtube didn't fully cover the tricks and ended up screwing both my ROG Ally and my Flow x13 laptop. Very sadly scratch the pads underneath of the ram chips and screwed up the MB. if you are trying to upgrade please verify your capabilities as it is a very sensitive process and you may end up in full dissapointment like I did.
IIRC, the steam deck has quad channel memory, so allocation would be 4 gig blocks and I believe it is 1 gig to GPU by default. This is then dynamically adjusted to find balance that gives the best performance while leaving a little free for background and misc. tasks.
@@bobbyjigglesalotoh thank you very much my friends for coming back 2 months later to share it with us. I immediately looked in the comments hoping to find the name of this game. Many thanks bro
I believe if you can allocate at least 8GB to the VRAM of that 32GB of RAM and you have 24GB of RAM, basically I'm saying how well the performance would be such as how much frames and how high of a graphic settings can you get.
Just so everyone is clear...when you set to 4g of VRAM...it is taking from the system RAM to add it to the VRAM...and you will be able to utilize less RAM, specifically , default you have usable about 14g RAM....with set to 4g VRAM, RAM utilized is only about 11g.
its the same performance,because the system setting run at 16GB ram only,just like 32bit window limited at 4GB Ram unless they have a feature like “Physical Address Extension” .
I dunno how/why RAM/VRAM would make a difference, but if you look @ 3:23 the GPU clock on the LCD32 is nearly DOUBLE the LCD16 and OLED16 and the CPU clock is about 200mhz higher. Maybe it's bottlenecked on swapping so it's clocking the CPU/GPU lower since it's waiting for data transfer? The CPU also seems to be using less power at a higher clock speed on the LCD32 vs the other two as well. This isn't seen necessarily in the other games, just in BeamNG, so maybe in VERY RAM heavy situations only.
The only reason i am considering getting a full pc rig again is solely because my friends want to play high intensive multiplayer games that lag horribly even on low settings -- example, once human. I also like games like rimworld, which tend to eat up ram. That said, i feel better replacing ram in a standard pc versus steam deck.
Would love to see more AAA games with higher texture settings that max out the 8gb VRAM allocation limit on Steam OS as well as 1% lows and how much of a reduction in stuttering and frame times. Great video nonetheless, was wondering about doing the upgrade. 👍🏽
Iirc the RAM vs VRAM on the Steam Deck is not 50/50. By default the Deck is configured to use 1GB of VRAM in the bios, and you can configure it up to 4GB.
The BIOS setting is the minimum amount that the GPU is allocated, and will automatically increase if it needs more and the CPU isn't using the extra RAM.
it's not the 1GB limit VRAM, but instead hard limit of how low the VRAM can be. You can image it as a container that have faucet on both ends, whichever fills faster will take more of the RAM, but the BIOS setting is to make sure that the VRAM will not take less than the specified amount.
1GB is is the default minimum allocated VRAM, you can increase the minimum allocated VRAM to 4GB. Steam OS has the ability to use beyond the minimum allocated VRAM to a max of 8GB. That's about half the total system RAM.
I tried looking at the website you recommended. Do you know how much upgrading the lcd to 32gb would cost ? Thank you. I know i should contact the company but Snice you had it done I thought I’d ask.
May have gotten more performance with the 7500LDDR5X, and modifying the bios to provide higher capacity for shared VRAM, to 8GB... but then the issues with power comes into play
The ram upgrade seems to help but if your goal is more fps notice the vram usage was basically the same it looks like there's a built in cap on vram no matter what which makes senses because when you look it up steam and everywhere else says it caps out at 8gb of ram which could mean it doesn't share 50/50 no matter what their might be a way around this or maybe not the gpu probably can't handle more than 8gb due to low power and cooling if you add better cooling with a way to supply maximum power for the cpu and gpu that they would typically use in a pc then it could be way better I think what should be done to see the max performance is hook the gpu up to a pc with the pc ram equivalent of a steam deck and see what happens
I still don't geht why you don't have more subs, honestly. And: 3:58 what game is that? Looks nice :D P.S.: And also 5:42, also, what game is it? Like it :)
A test with an NVMe with good constant writes and a SWAP partition (not as a file because of overhead und please no ZRAM since it's inferior) compared to the modded 32GB model should be nice. Also many tweaks are available in that matter: like RAM page compression with ZSWAP (zstd with z3fold is a no brainer) and max ratio (standard should be 20-30%). Meaning you can compress RAM pages in real time (If i remember zstd is used at level 3) with zero performance lost before them even being swapped in the first place.
THIS NEEDS TO BE TESTED. Looks like you really know your stuff. So one question about ZRAM, you say it's inferior, but I've seen people say it's better than what SteamOS was using before, so what's going on there? Why is it inferior / superior?
@@cheater00 ZSWAP also compress ram pages even before them being pushed toward either a swap file or partition. So for example if you choose a small swappiness, 1 for example to only use swap at the last resort, it will still compress unused ram pages. ZRAM is limited in that matter since it only compress ram pages virtually. ZSWAP is used by standard on newer Kernel. Nowadays ZRAM should only be used on very limited devices with verry little or slow disk space.
With all the AI assistive graphic processes I don't think you're going to see any graphical issues in future steam decks, the technology for graphical upscaling it's getting really good to the point where nobody's going to know what's happening.
The steam decorators are incredibly smart. They purposely released underpowered systems and are going to drip feed minor improvements to extend sales for a long time…. i’m sure somewhere in there top-secret vault is a steam deck with a battery life of five hours a way better GPU and 64 GB of ram that will be released in a few years
The difference will be clear only in AAA games that's vram hungry. Try to put textures or image quality at the highest possible setting to see the difference. Also, does this custom bios allow you to dedicate 8 gb to vram? If not, I don't see the benefit because I don't think it can use 50% of ram for graphics only...
How would this do with a lcd deck running windows trying to play cal of duty? I hit 30-45 fps in warzone 3 .. rather play on my gaming laptop and hit constant 120fps but modding my deck would be cool and more portable than laptop
Please could you consider testing Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West? HZD usually has good framerates but then it also loves to get stuttery and I wonder if this fixes it. I would appreciate this a lot! There's also another test that you could run. So currently games that need more than 16 gigs of memory will spill over into the ssd for virtual memory. But there's something in the works called ZRAM, which SteamOS 3.6 uses by default, which instead of using SSD, just "zips up" memory and keeps that "zipped" data in the ram. So it would be interesting to see if this is helped by the 32 gig mod, and if maybe the algorithm needs to be tuned for 32 gigs.
What setting do you run on cyberpunk? I get 44.63 FPS on my benchmark on the OLED and average about 3 hours battery. I did do the cryoutilities but I highly doubt that would increase my performance by roughly 50% Default “Steamdeck” setting suck on anything that offered that option I’ve found and usually have to tweak several settings.
Update for anyone asking about the possibility of an OLED upgrade -
Right now there is no source for higher density chips for the OLED model. I've been told Micron will soon be making these chips available for sale soon.
Also, I'll have links to all the parts I use with the Steam Decks - as well as some shops if you'd like to upgrade your Deck.
Big thanks to Ridge for sponsoring this project and allowing me to pickup another Steam Deck for testing. Thanks again for watching.
What chips did you use?
Please do a video when they do! Would love to see a 32GB mod on an OLED.
The original memory was Hynix. I installed Samsung. I re-soldered the jumper. After this, there is no image on the built-in screen. There is an image via HDMI. The screen is intact. The screen cable is intact. What could be the problem? Flashing BIOS doesn't help
The original memory was Hynix. I installed Samsung. I re-soldered the jumper. After this, there is no image on the built-in screen. There is an image via HDMI. The screen is intact. The screen cable is intact. What could be the problem? Flashing BIOS doesn't help
just shooting the shit here but is there any chance of a 48 or 64 gig mod on either version of the deck?
I think for most cases you fix this issue with just having lower quality textures... In Cyberpunk I find it kind of absurd that it defaults to "high textures", when it is actually quite hard to appreciate that level of detail on 800p... I reduced the textures to medium and a lot of the stuttering disappeared. I don't always think that throwing more hardware at the problem is the right way to go. It's a balancing act. And I think most gamer's need to acknowledge that medium textures look really good on a Steam Deck. :)
This
Phenomenal work with this explanation! I couldn't agree more and truly thank you for sharing! 💪🤓
it’s a $600 device i shouldn’t have to worry about that
The very reason Deckverse recommended setting the Textures to Medium, I suppose.
I guess if you've never been a "low spec gamer", you'd never know.
I have an OLED on order and videos like this get me more comfortable with my purchase 👍👍👍
Same!!! I was considering getting a used LCD model when I saw one at CeX, but deep down I wanted the OLED and went for a new one!
I ordered a refurbished one for 299 euros. I think it's still a great option for the price. The oled version was to expensive for me, especially because I have a desktop computer at home that will do the majority of my gaming tasks
I just bought one yesterday and I’ve been doing nothing but looking at Steam Deck videos and tutorials. I’m so excited man.
@WavyMac i truly hope you enjoy it! Its so awesome and fun to use!
I bought an oled a month ago, no regrets I love it
i just wanna give you props for 2:28 i was like which is which? saw the plates and went "oh!" lol
fk sakes I didn't clock that until I saw your comment 😅
He also outright says, which is which. Don't really see where there's any confusion.
I know, right? He says, but usually UA-camrs will just label them lmao
I did the research on how to upgrade the ram. it requires pulling off the ram modules off the main SOC and soldering in new RAM modules.
No thanks. Ive pulled my steam deck down fully, replaced plates, cleaned the button contacts, replaced trigger springs, changed and swapped out SSDs and am a person who loves how easy it is to pull the SD down. But that? Nah son, if I have to solder in new RAM modules obtained from a questionable source id would rather wait for SD2
And while you're at you can hot rod an egpu out the back of it lol
@@Spencerwalker21 just download more RAM… EZ
@@VyllenceGamingyeah, and download RTX5090
I'm talking about PC here but imo in -current year- EVERYONE should get 32gb of ram for gaming. I'm constantly surprised but how many games happily use more than 16gb when they have access to it. Also, using Hogwarts: Legacy is just cheating. That game will devour 32gb of ram and still have the audacity to crash regularly LOL
16gb should be enough just for gaming now, but normally we never have just the game running, we have other apps that eat the ram, so 32gb would be the safepot for now. For steamdeck, steamOS specifically where you can only be doing 1 thing at a time, 16gb ram is just fine.
Going 16 instead of 32 doesn't save a lot of money these days, so it almost doesn't make sense to just get 16GB.
But purely from a technical perspective, it's far more useful to increase from 16 the 32 on a shared memory device like the Deck. On desktop the GPU will usually have its own memory and most games are fairly economical about system memory usage.
Dont want to burst your buble but steamdeck is a pc.
16gb is fine for most gaming workloads. Handhelds should be at 24gb or 32gb just so more ram can be allocated to the GPU
16gb plenty. Not everyone games at high details and resolution
Finally - someone tested the difference!! Thank you for putting the effort in. Would love to see more 🤘
This was the first video I watched on this channel and boy this was refreshing. I love that It was simple and well organized. It reminds me of what PC videos were like back when I got into it, around the intel's 4th generation processors. I havent felt that since I got into PCs!
Kudos for changing car's number plates for separate tests
This is exactly the question I had when I started seeing these 32 GB mod videos. Thanks for taking the time to address these questions. Definitely interested in seeing how this affects desktop mode in RAM heavy apps and emulation. I'm also curious to see the effects of increasing the memory allocated to the GPU on the upgraded deck. Does the custom bios allow you to allocate more RAM than the default bios? And if it does, how does it affect performance and stability in games that can make use of the additional memory?
Finally somebody did some actual benchmarking! I would love to see if a ram upgrade makes any difference for the oled model
Star citizen, ARK ( old and new ) and heavily modded Skyrim and fallout 4 are the only games that come to mind that will greatly benefit from 32GB of ram. In most cases you’ll run out of VRAM way before system ram if you sticking with 16GB.
In steamdeck CPU and GPU use the same memory pool
Emulation tests would be neat. TOTK eats through ~14 gigs total from the start on Ryujinx as I recall it, even crashed my steam deck
That's the Emulator being poorly coded or not optimized to run in a Wine/Proton environment. Similar specs on Windows run better.
Finally video comparing the performance of Steam Decks was something I was curious about, seeing how the tuned version stacks up against the unmodified one
Nice video. Good production. Really like the nice touch of putting the mari on the cars plate
I think you could increase fps even more if you could increae the UMA buffer size to 8gb alongside applying cryoutilities swap fixes.
😮 bro he should have tried that for real
Wow, I loved this video. Super well made, and your voice and presentation are top notch. Thanks for the info about the 32GB!
Yeah his voice and cadence was made for these type of tech videos
Excellent video! Been looking for info about this for a while!
Would really love to see more comparisons (Especially modded Fallout!) and maybe even emulation.
it surprises me how the Steam Deck can struggle managing its 16GB of RAM, while the PS5 and Xbox Series X run the exact same amout like it's no deal, and before anyone says it's because power well that'd be even more reason for them to struggle even more since they're way more demanding which would also require way more RAM, specially in 4K where a TON of VRAM is required, like over 10GB, leaving even less for system, how do those ones manage their RAM
They don’t have separate isolated RAM and VRAM in traditional sense at all.
Their GDDR6 video ram equally accessible to CPU and GPU at full speed at all times. Some very small amount are may be dedicated to strictly GPU / CPU but in general they use it as one big pool
Steam os id more hesvy than console operating systems
PS5/Xbox games are optimized to those constraints and run almost in "bare metal" with little overhead. Steam deck games are "normal" PC games created using game engines designed to run in hundreds of PC configurations thus creating a ton of overhead.
For the "outdated" specs, I would say the deck still holds very well thanks to its operating system being very lean. That's why I don't understand people installing windows on the deck to game, you're just putting even more constraints on the hardware by using it, at this point you might as well buy a laptop.
That's also the reason why the decks competitors, while better in specs, all fail to sell as good as the deck.
SteamOS is awesome for handheld gaming, you can install Bazzite but it's not really the same thing.
My key takeaway from this video is: Wow, does 720p ever look terrible.
Good video. I'd like to see at least 24GB on the Ally 2, Legion go 2, and Deck 2.
Why? I rather get better APU or faster memory
@@MrQuay03 Because after testing so many games on the Rog ally, working around the 16GB has been the biggest problem Ive had so far. Having a faster APU is nice but if its still bottle necked from not enough system ram, it wont make new games run that much better than the previous model.
Back when RAM was first introduced it was a game changer. That's because it allowed multi-tasking on computers. RAM hold the information of a program open. That's what RAM still is to this date.
Adding more RAM to a device whose CPU/APU/GPU is "slow" won't make much of an impact.
Video RAM holds shaders, but if the GPU/APU is not fast enough it won't be able to calculate the graphics in time. If you're playing a game with lots of action going on, the VRAM will hold it open BUT if the APU/GPU is slow, it will process each frame slowly which results in stuttering/lag.
Adding more RAM seems like a cool thing if you intend on using the SteamDeck as a laptop replacement, but for gaming it'll do 0 to nothing. Awesome video regardless.
Having more vram on Jedi survivor or final fantasy 16 at higher settings would stop crashes(or system crashes when using swap files)
you should try comparing the 512gb and 1t b of storage, thats if it's even possible for you within your budget, I'm curious about buying one myself but with like lots of storage personally for me
you should have tested games that are known for being a problem with 16GB
like avatar: frontiers of pandora and alan wake 2
or maybe crunk texture up in some recent AAA, usually if u have enough vram/ram high texture is a free visual upgrade.
Awesome, THANK YOU. Like you say, tons of videos on doing the swap, but none actually show performance.
Where did you get those Thumb Stick Covers at 0:05
idk
great video editting, just wish the examples had titles for which device it was
I tried upgrading my laptop ram to 32GB and unfortunalty the videos on youtube didn't fully cover the tricks and ended up screwing both my ROG Ally and my Flow x13 laptop. Very sadly scratch the pads underneath of the ram chips and screwed up the MB. if you are trying to upgrade please verify your capabilities as it is a very sensitive process and you may end up in full dissapointment like I did.
IIRC, the steam deck has quad channel memory, so allocation would be 4 gig blocks and I believe it is 1 gig to GPU by default. This is then dynamically adjusted to find balance that gives the best performance while leaving a little free for background and misc. tasks.
3:55 game ?
It's called Midnight Fight Express.
Thanks!
3:55 what game is this?
It’s called midnight fight express just so everyone knows
@@bobbyjigglesalotoh thank you very much my friends for coming back 2 months later to share it with us. I immediately looked in the comments hoping to find the name of this game. Many thanks bro
Good video. I enjoy tweaking hardware and thinking outside of the box.
I like how you changed the license plates to which steam deck memory you were testing 🤩
I believe if you can allocate at least 8GB to the VRAM of that 32GB of RAM and you have 24GB of RAM, basically I'm saying how well the performance would be such as how much frames and how high of a graphic settings can you get.
Cryo utilities is sufficient which doesn't require any hardware upgrades aside from the SSD.
Agreed, cryo utilities really helps with no hardware upgrades necessary.
Cryoutilities helps but SSD is nowhere near as fast as RAM, constant paging to and from the SSD will cause stuttering.
Pretty smart leaving the soldering part near the end of the video. I would've closed out the video had I known that sooner. Respect.
Just so everyone is clear...when you set to 4g of VRAM...it is taking from the system RAM to add it to the VRAM...and you will be able to utilize less RAM, specifically , default you have usable about 14g RAM....with set to 4g VRAM, RAM utilized is only about 11g.
its the same performance,because the system setting run at 16GB ram only,just like 32bit window limited at 4GB Ram unless they have a feature like “Physical Address Extension” .
I dunno how/why RAM/VRAM would make a difference, but if you look @ 3:23 the GPU clock on the LCD32 is nearly DOUBLE the LCD16 and OLED16 and the CPU clock is about 200mhz higher. Maybe it's bottlenecked on swapping so it's clocking the CPU/GPU lower since it's waiting for data transfer? The CPU also seems to be using less power at a higher clock speed on the LCD32 vs the other two as well. This isn't seen necessarily in the other games, just in BeamNG, so maybe in VERY RAM heavy situations only.
Definitely interested in an emulator follow up video!
Why you dont press keys on your screwdriver? :D
I'd be interested to see how the RAM in the OLED performs if put in the LCD.
interesting!
Great video and the red/black skin on your Oled looks badass
Dbrand
Please do follow up( in reference to the 6 minute mark question) I'd love to see what you bring to the table, I most definitely subscribed!💪🤓
The only reason i am considering getting a full pc rig again is solely because my friends want to play high intensive multiplayer games that lag horribly even on low settings -- example, once human. I also like games like rimworld, which tend to eat up ram. That said, i feel better replacing ram in a standard pc versus steam deck.
Would love to see more AAA games with higher texture settings that max out the 8gb VRAM allocation limit on Steam OS as well as 1% lows and how much of a reduction in stuttering and frame times. Great video nonetheless, was wondering about doing the upgrade. 👍🏽
I find it fascinating just how much more battery life the OLED version gets.
Iirc the RAM vs VRAM on the Steam Deck is not 50/50. By default the Deck is configured to use 1GB of VRAM in the bios, and you can configure it up to 4GB.
The BIOS setting is the minimum amount that the GPU is allocated, and will automatically increase if it needs more and the CPU isn't using the extra RAM.
it's not the 1GB limit VRAM, but instead hard limit of how low the VRAM can be. You can image it as a container that have faucet on both ends, whichever fills faster will take more of the RAM, but the BIOS setting is to make sure that the VRAM will not take less than the specified amount.
1GB is is the default minimum allocated VRAM, you can increase the minimum allocated VRAM to 4GB. Steam OS has the ability to use beyond the minimum allocated VRAM to a max of 8GB. That's about half the total system RAM.
I tried looking at the website you recommended. Do you know how much upgrading the lcd to 32gb would cost ? Thank you.
I know i should contact the company but Snice you had it done I thought I’d ask.
May have gotten more performance with the 7500LDDR5X, and modifying the bios to provide higher capacity for shared VRAM, to 8GB... but then the issues with power comes into play
Whats that martial arts game you played called?
This is what I wanted to know
Midnight Fight Express
You should test out; Last Epoch, Ratchet & Clank. These games are ram heavy, test it for longer periods of time.
Will you be making a tips video for the Rog Ally ?
Finally some updates fot this mod, thanks!
What game were you playing after Hogwarts at min 3:55 ??
Midnight Fight Express
now how does this perform on windows 11? can you use the upgrade to its potential?
How is the battery after the upgrade?
The ram upgrade seems to help but if your goal is more fps notice the vram usage was basically the same it looks like there's a built in cap on vram no matter what which makes senses because when you look it up steam and everywhere else says it caps out at 8gb of ram which could mean it doesn't share 50/50 no matter what their might be a way around this or maybe not the gpu probably can't handle more than 8gb due to low power and cooling if you add better cooling with a way to supply maximum power for the cpu and gpu that they would typically use in a pc then it could be way better I think what should be done to see the max performance is hook the gpu up to a pc with the pc ram equivalent of a steam deck and see what happens
Any chance that faster RAM can be installed? I feel like that would make more of a difference.
I still don't geht why you don't have more subs, honestly. And: 3:58 what game is that? Looks nice :D P.S.: And also 5:42, also, what game is it? Like it :)
the game in 3:58 is called Midnight Fight Express !!
Game at 5:42 looks like "Just Cause 2" because of the same mini map placement. The later games in the series dont have mini map.
This might give me an excuse to upgrade my soldering setup to do reballing / BGA soldering.
Is it possible to do the same upgrade to the OLED?
Does the bios allow us to use faster ram yet?
A test with an NVMe with good constant writes and a SWAP partition (not as a file because of overhead und please no ZRAM since it's inferior) compared to the modded 32GB model should be nice. Also many tweaks are available in that matter: like RAM page compression with ZSWAP (zstd with z3fold is a no brainer) and max ratio (standard should be 20-30%). Meaning you can compress RAM pages in real time (If i remember zstd is used at level 3) with zero performance lost before them even being swapped in the first place.
THIS NEEDS TO BE TESTED. Looks like you really know your stuff.
So one question about ZRAM, you say it's inferior, but I've seen people say it's better than what SteamOS was using before, so what's going on there? Why is it inferior / superior?
@@cheater00 ZSWAP also compress ram pages even before them being pushed toward either a swap file or partition. So for example if you choose a small swappiness, 1 for example to only use swap at the last resort, it will still compress unused ram pages. ZRAM is limited in that matter since it only compress ram pages virtually. ZSWAP is used by standard on newer Kernel. Nowadays ZRAM should only be used on very limited devices with verry little or slow disk space.
@@InternetD1991 so zswap is basically zrwm that can swap out?
@@cheater00 More or less: yes. I recommend the Archlinux wiki an its commented sources in that matter.
Finally someone who test the performance of 32gb mod
Given you have to allocate 4gb to vramr, you are only left with 12gb of usable ram . So a bump to minimum 24gb would be nice.
What is the game in 3:58?🙏
Midnight Fight Express
Give Star Citizen a shot. Since 3.20 or so it's gotten a bit more memory intensive so it would be a solid test.
Does anyone know what the second game is called? The hand to hand combat one? Looks awesome.
What if you put in an LED in the LCD w/ 2x the RAM ?
that skin, where did you get it?
What game is this at 5:44 ?
Maybe its Just Cause 3 or 2 or I dont know
or maybe just cause 4
With all the AI assistive graphic processes I don't think you're going to see any graphical issues in future steam decks, the technology for graphical upscaling it's getting really good to the point where nobody's going to know what's happening.
So do you have to flash the bios every time there is an update like you have to do when you replace the screen with deckhd?
3:56 What game is this please?
Also want to know!
Midnight Fight Express
The steam decorators are incredibly smart. They purposely released underpowered systems and are going to drip feed minor improvements to extend sales for a long time….
i’m sure somewhere in there top-secret vault is a steam deck with a battery life of five hours a way better GPU and 64 GB of ram that will be released in a few years
The difference will be clear only in AAA games that's vram hungry. Try to put textures or image quality at the highest possible setting to see the difference. Also, does this custom bios allow you to dedicate 8 gb to vram? If not, I don't see the benefit because I don't think it can use 50% of ram for graphics only...
Finally! Some 'deditated WAM' benchmarking
what is WAM?
@@cheater00 WAM is WAM. 'Deditated WAM'
Just look up "SuperKai64"
Hy, do you try to change APU and RAm. Kernel or bios manage the power ?
How does Yuzu or Cemu performed on the 32GB version?
Can’t you replace the cpu/gpu chip?
Which steam deck was starfield bricked on?
I thought the same thing (they dont show performance) and finally someone did it
How would this do with a lcd deck running windows trying to play cal of duty? I hit 30-45 fps in warzone 3 .. rather play on my gaming laptop and hit constant 120fps but modding my deck would be cool and more portable than laptop
how do i download more ram
I wonder if thr next iteration would give consumers to just upgrade their parts like a modular console?
Nice idea tbh. Very consumer friendly too.
Please could you consider testing Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West? HZD usually has good framerates but then it also loves to get stuttery and I wonder if this fixes it.
I would appreciate this a lot!
There's also another test that you could run.
So currently games that need more than 16 gigs of memory will spill over into the ssd for virtual memory. But there's something in the works called ZRAM, which SteamOS 3.6 uses by default, which instead of using SSD, just "zips up" memory and keeps that "zipped" data in the ram. So it would be interesting to see if this is helped by the 32 gig mod, and if maybe the algorithm needs to be tuned for 32 gigs.
I can't wait until someone makes an adapter for oculink port with an M.2 SSD reader
Did Valve gave some date on when they'll release steam deck 2?
I really wish the steam deck came with 16, 32, and 64gb versions
What setting do you run on cyberpunk? I get 44.63 FPS on my benchmark on the OLED and average about 3 hours battery. I did do the cryoutilities but I highly doubt that would increase my performance by roughly 50%
Default “Steamdeck” setting suck on anything that offered that option I’ve found and usually have to tweak several settings.
how much of the ram does the custom bios allocate to the igpu?
wow what an amazing video i thank you sir
Uh, Starfield hasn't had an update since March 6th...
Why not oled with ram upgrade?
In virginia, what are my options for sending my steamdeck on for 32GB modding?
imagine Valve go with RDNA4 next time around. 32GB ram will take advantage of that.
What game is at 4:01? Thanks!
Id watch some emulation testing on them.
It’s because it’s bottlenecked by the cpu so no matter how much ram you put on, the cpu is gonna make it nearly useless