The Power and Performance of Off-the-Shelf GPUs: A Handheld Gaming PC Perspective

When it comes to handheld gaming PCs, power consumption is a crucial factor to consider. A device that consumes too much power can quickly drain its battery, limiting playtime. In this article, we'll explore the performance and power consumption of off-the-shelf GPUs in handheld gaming PCs.

Let's take a look at an example of what can be achieved with current technology. The Steam Deck, for instance, is powered by a 15-watt GPU. While it's impressive to see that level of performance in such a small form factor, we need to remember that this is a custom-designed chip specifically for the Steam Deck. If we were to use an off-the-shelf RTX 3050 GPU, which is a more common and widely available option, we'd likely see higher power consumption.

In fact, using an RTX 3050 with a CPU of 12 watts in a handheld gaming PC results in a total TDP (Thermal Design Power) of around 36 watts. This is significantly higher than the Steam Deck's 15-watt total TDP. To put this into perspective, 36 watts is roughly equivalent to using an RTX 3050 in a desktop build. While it's still impressive performance for a handheld gaming PC, it's not exactly what we'd consider "low power consumption."

When it comes to actual game performance, the results are quite promising. Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p low settings with DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) set to Quality yields an average frame rate of around 71 FPS. However, if we switch DLSS from Quality to Performance, we see a significant boost in frame rates, reaching averages in the mid-80s. This is impressive performance for a handheld gaming PC, and it's great to see that even with lower power consumption settings, the GPU can still deliver smooth gameplay.

Another game we tested was Forza Horizon 5 at 900p medium settings with DLSS enabled. The result? An average frame rate of around 87 FPS. This is fantastic performance for a handheld gaming PC, and it's clear that off-the-shelf GPUs in these devices are capable of delivering impressive visuals.

However, not all games perform as well on this device. We struggled to get Mortal Kombat 1 running at high settings with DLSS enabled, requiring us to reduce the resolution or turn down the graphics quality. This is a common issue with off-the-shelf GPUs in handheld gaming PCs, and it's something that manufacturers will need to address if they want to deliver top-tier performance.

Finally, we tested out OG Skyrim on 1080p ultra settings with DLSS enabled. The result? An average frame rate of around 11 Watts (our GPU) out of the RTX 3050, which is an impressive achievement. While this might not be as high as some of the other games we tested, it's still a great example of how off-the-shelf GPUs can deliver smooth performance in popular titles.

In conclusion, using off-the-shelf GPUs in handheld gaming PCs results in higher power consumption than custom-designed chips like the Steam Deck's RTX 3050. However, the performance is still impressive, and we've seen some fantastic frame rates in popular games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 5.

While this isn't exactly what we'd consider "low power consumption" for a handheld gaming PC, it's clear that off-the-shelf GPUs can deliver top-tier performance even with higher power requirements. Manufacturers will need to continue pushing the boundaries of power efficiency if they want to create truly portable and long-lasting gaming PCs.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again there's no doubt that the handheld Market is definitely blowing up and it has been for quite some time now one of the main competitors on the market that really got the ball rolling is obviously the steam deck and now we've got the steam deck olab we've also seen the Rog Ally a lot of iono devices GPD 1X player a lot of people have kind of jumped on it and one thing that all of these have in common is AMD so they're using an AMD Apu which houses the CPU and the igpu portion of everything and Intel isn't a stranger to the handheld Market either we've had some older 1X players some older GPD stuff powered by Intel and now we've got the new MSI claw which uh performance is definitely a bit lackluster I've been keeping up to date with the BIOS and uh MSI control center with mine trying to see if we could get a big jump in performance on this thing but unfortunately it hasn't happened just yet but one major player that's been missing from the handheld Market is obviously Nvidia so I'm a huge fan of the Nvidia gpus and I know right now they're really focused on AI with their data centers and everything like that but there's no doubt they do make some pretty powerful gpus and recently there is a rumor floating around that Nvidia is working on a handheld and hopefully we don't see something like the shield now when this released awesome handheld I've actually still got mine I was thinking about doing a 2024 showcase on this thing but this is powered by arm and as a lot of you already know the switch uses an Nvidia chip which is also an armed chip personally I would love to see Nvidia kind of team up with somebody and come up with an x86 solution something with either an integrated GPU or even a dgpu like we see in laptops but it definitely needs to be a newer generation RTX and one of the big things I think that they could bring to the table is their dlss technology so when we're talking about a smaller screen 7in 8 in screen going up to 1080p from 900p to my eye doesn't make a huge difference I wouldn't mind playing at 900p as long as I could get those really high Fram rates or at least newer AAA games with a higher setting at let's say 60 FPS and another thing that I've personally been using quite a bit on their 4000 series gpus is frame generation it does work wonders in some situations on harder to run games when you're talking about let's say an RTX 4060 or something like that you can definitely get a much higher frame rate using frame gen now don't get me wrong amd's fluid motion frames is getting better FSR is great for those lower-end gpus and pairing this up with all of their Technologies using let's say hyper RX does work out really well on higher-end gpus personally I haven't seen a super jump in performance on the lower in I gpus which don't put out that much performance talking about the Radeon 78m that we're seeing in a lot of these handhelds with the 7,000 series and 8,000 series apus down the road we'll definitely see much better performance out of these ipus but I think Nvidia could definitely come to the table with something really really interesting un fortunately there's much more money in AI Technologies and they're definitely going to be focusing on that for quite some time but to keep the mainstream happy I mean there's always a chance that we'll see an Nvidia powered handheld hit the market and I'd love to see him partner up with somebody like let's say Intel Intel on the CPU side keep an x86 so we know we can get all of our favorite PC games up and running Nvidia over on the GPU side of things so what I've come up with here is what I'd like to see out of an Nvidia powered handheld and recently I did post it in my Community section asking everybody the same question if you want to let me know in the comments of this video go right ahead but this is exactly what I'd like to see out of an Nvidia handheld whether they partner with somebody or create one themselves at least a 7-in 120 HZ OLED display with variable refresh rate we definitely need that to keep everything nice and smooth a 6 core x86 CPU now of course everybody wants to see that eight cores 16 threads but I think we could get by with six cores and not even 12 threads if we had a good enough CPU and now that a lot of these manufacturers are using the big and little architecture performance and efficiency cores this could work out really well having something like two performance cores four efficiency cores or vice versa you know they definitely have to do a lot of testing to keep that power draw down because after all we are going to be working with a battery powered Unit 16 the 32 GB of system RAM and of course we want an RTX based GPU with its own vram personally I think if they came out of the door with with a handheld that even performs on par with an RTX 3050 6 GB model on a 7-in display 1080p might have to drop some down to 900 with the high settings this would definitely dominate the market of course if it's not based on a to love lace we're not going to get that new frame generation so maybe even just a modified RTX 4050 lower power draw maybe even lower clocks knowing that it's going to be a battery powered unit and we got to keep that battery up but at the time of making this video even the lowest in RTX 4064 laptops will draw much more power than we really want to draw with a handheld like this at least to get an our 2 hours of battery life out of it so they will need to come up with some type of custom chip and I really think it could be done but it would definitely need to be a custom job specifically designed for these handhelds and again even if it performed like the RTX 3050 we would see a lot of people jumping on this given the price point was okay I mean we've seen a lot of really expensive handhelds hit the market it's not going to match something like the steam deck OLED not exactly sure how valve is doing it but I mean it's pretty amazing seeing the performance that that's putting out and the kind of battery life you can get out of it also remember that Apu is coming in with a total TDP of 15 watts but of course Nvidia hasn't partnered up with anybody to make an x86 handheld like this so it's pretty impossible to test but we can try to get really close to those specs and see exactly what happens so I've got my test rig here and uh you might see we've got the I74 700k very highend CP for a handheld we're never going to see one of these in here but what I've done is actually disable all the performance sces except for one we've got five efficiency cores running here and I want to show you we're only at a 12 watt TDP so every once in a while I do see it Spike up to around 13.3 uh from the BIOS I've said it as low as we can possibly go here so 12 Watts right there I mean we could go lower than this but performance just really does fall in its face when it's any lower than 12 Watts so a six core Intel CPU and checking out for remark we've got a lowprofile RTX 3506 gig model I've lowered the power as much as possible from After Burner but this is the only way that I could get the wattage down and the lowest I can get this thing to go from After Burner by lowering the power limit is around 24 watt so right here you can see our GPU power is 23.6 kind of jumps up every once in a while so in total we're talking from the GPU and CPU and that's all the power we're calculating right now now we're talking a total TDP between the CPU and GPU of 36 Watts again we're not going to come close to what the steam deck doing at 15 watts whatever they've done over there is pretty magical and you know I'd love to see a manufacturer come out and hit those kind of numbers with better performance but right now the way things are we're going to need more power to get more performance that's just how it is with these gpus and CPUs right now and another thing to keep in mind is I'm using off-the-shelf Parts with these custom chips if this ever came to fruition they could definitely get the power draw much lower than we're seeing right now but I still wanted to do some testing with this unit to show you what kind of performance this thing's putting out CPU at 12 Watts we've got that RTX 30506 gig model coming in at around 24 watts and the first game we have here is cyberpunk 2077 1080p low settings with dlss set to Quality we're seeing an average of around 71 FPS so what I want to do here is take dlss from quality to Performance and I'll tell you even on a bigger screen I have a hard time noticing dlss from quality to Balan going from No dlss 2 performance it's really hard to notice on a really nice 7-in display and with this we gained a nice little bump in performance instead of getting an average of around 71 we're seeing averages in the mid 80s so another thing to take note of is our GPU power consumption right up 21 22 Watts still right there at 12 Watts on the GPU we've got an unlocked frame rate so I'm going to go ahead and lock this at 60 and now with it locked at 60 our GPU doesn't need to work as hard rendering those extra frames that are basically unneeded in some cases now it's really great to run over 60 I completely understand that but in a handheld form factor if we can get 1080p 60 gameplay out of AAA games like this I'd be totally content with it definitely an easier one to run fors a horizon 5 but right now we're not using any kind of dlss High settings 60fps 1080p putting down this kind of performance in a handheld would be really nice but again this is all speculation we're working with off-the-shelf parts to kind of get this up and running Horizon forbidden West 900p low settings and uh this was kind of one of the harder ones to run it's definitely a newer game on the market but we're up in the mid 80s again locking all these down will allow us to draw less from a GPU here's Mortal Kombat 1 high settings 1080p with dlss set to balance on all of the AMD handhelds that I've tested so far with the 780m we do have to take this down to 900p medium settings or even 1080 low with a lot of FSR and one that's always struggled on the amdi gpus right now is po world there's no built-in FSR without doing a modification but there is dlss and it does work wonders with this game on these lower power GP use and finally going way back one of my favorite games OG Skyrim this is not the remastered version 1080p ultra settings and I really wanted to throw this in just to see how it was hitting up that GPU you can see we get kind of a maximum of around 11 Watts out of this RTX 3050 which is pretty great and yeah for handheld situations this would be awesome not drawing so much power killing that battery really fast and again this is all speculation we're using off-the-shelf Parts lowering that wattage down trying to get really low power consumption and even then with these parts we're right there to around 36 Watts total TDP across the CPU and GPU not quite what we want to see in a handheld but with a custom chip from Nvidia I think we could see that kind of performance at a lower wattage now I'm not talking 15 watts like the steam deck it will be higher and we see a lot of these handhelds on the market especially from AMD and the manufacturer state that kind of performance mode is 28 Watts if we could get there in that sweet spot with an Nvidia RTX GPU in one of these allowing us to use dlss I think it would be a game changer for the handheld Market but we're going to have to wait and see and I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments below what kind of features would you like to see in an RTX powered handheld gaming PC that's going to wrap it up for this one if you've got any questions let me know and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again there's no doubt that the handheld Market is definitely blowing up and it has been for quite some time now one of the main competitors on the market that really got the ball rolling is obviously the steam deck and now we've got the steam deck olab we've also seen the Rog Ally a lot of iono devices GPD 1X player a lot of people have kind of jumped on it and one thing that all of these have in common is AMD so they're using an AMD Apu which houses the CPU and the igpu portion of everything and Intel isn't a stranger to the handheld Market either we've had some older 1X players some older GPD stuff powered by Intel and now we've got the new MSI claw which uh performance is definitely a bit lackluster I've been keeping up to date with the BIOS and uh MSI control center with mine trying to see if we could get a big jump in performance on this thing but unfortunately it hasn't happened just yet but one major player that's been missing from the handheld Market is obviously Nvidia so I'm a huge fan of the Nvidia gpus and I know right now they're really focused on AI with their data centers and everything like that but there's no doubt they do make some pretty powerful gpus and recently there is a rumor floating around that Nvidia is working on a handheld and hopefully we don't see something like the shield now when this released awesome handheld I've actually still got mine I was thinking about doing a 2024 showcase on this thing but this is powered by arm and as a lot of you already know the switch uses an Nvidia chip which is also an armed chip personally I would love to see Nvidia kind of team up with somebody and come up with an x86 solution something with either an integrated GPU or even a dgpu like we see in laptops but it definitely needs to be a newer generation RTX and one of the big things I think that they could bring to the table is their dlss technology so when we're talking about a smaller screen 7in 8 in screen going up to 1080p from 900p to my eye doesn't make a huge difference I wouldn't mind playing at 900p as long as I could get those really high Fram rates or at least newer AAA games with a higher setting at let's say 60 FPS and another thing that I've personally been using quite a bit on their 4000 series gpus is frame generation it does work wonders in some situations on harder to run games when you're talking about let's say an RTX 4060 or something like that you can definitely get a much higher frame rate using frame gen now don't get me wrong amd's fluid motion frames is getting better FSR is great for those lower-end gpus and pairing this up with all of their Technologies using let's say hyper RX does work out really well on higher-end gpus personally I haven't seen a super jump in performance on the lower in I gpus which don't put out that much performance talking about the Radeon 78m that we're seeing in a lot of these handhelds with the 7,000 series and 8,000 series apus down the road we'll definitely see much better performance out of these ipus but I think Nvidia could definitely come to the table with something really really interesting un fortunately there's much more money in AI Technologies and they're definitely going to be focusing on that for quite some time but to keep the mainstream happy I mean there's always a chance that we'll see an Nvidia powered handheld hit the market and I'd love to see him partner up with somebody like let's say Intel Intel on the CPU side keep an x86 so we know we can get all of our favorite PC games up and running Nvidia over on the GPU side of things so what I've come up with here is what I'd like to see out of an Nvidia powered handheld and recently I did post it in my Community section asking everybody the same question if you want to let me know in the comments of this video go right ahead but this is exactly what I'd like to see out of an Nvidia handheld whether they partner with somebody or create one themselves at least a 7-in 120 HZ OLED display with variable refresh rate we definitely need that to keep everything nice and smooth a 6 core x86 CPU now of course everybody wants to see that eight cores 16 threads but I think we could get by with six cores and not even 12 threads if we had a good enough CPU and now that a lot of these manufacturers are using the big and little architecture performance and efficiency cores this could work out really well having something like two performance cores four efficiency cores or vice versa you know they definitely have to do a lot of testing to keep that power draw down because after all we are going to be working with a battery powered Unit 16 the 32 GB of system RAM and of course we want an RTX based GPU with its own vram personally I think if they came out of the door with with a handheld that even performs on par with an RTX 3050 6 GB model on a 7-in display 1080p might have to drop some down to 900 with the high settings this would definitely dominate the market of course if it's not based on a to love lace we're not going to get that new frame generation so maybe even just a modified RTX 4050 lower power draw maybe even lower clocks knowing that it's going to be a battery powered unit and we got to keep that battery up but at the time of making this video even the lowest in RTX 4064 laptops will draw much more power than we really want to draw with a handheld like this at least to get an our 2 hours of battery life out of it so they will need to come up with some type of custom chip and I really think it could be done but it would definitely need to be a custom job specifically designed for these handhelds and again even if it performed like the RTX 3050 we would see a lot of people jumping on this given the price point was okay I mean we've seen a lot of really expensive handhelds hit the market it's not going to match something like the steam deck OLED not exactly sure how valve is doing it but I mean it's pretty amazing seeing the performance that that's putting out and the kind of battery life you can get out of it also remember that Apu is coming in with a total TDP of 15 watts but of course Nvidia hasn't partnered up with anybody to make an x86 handheld like this so it's pretty impossible to test but we can try to get really close to those specs and see exactly what happens so I've got my test rig here and uh you might see we've got the I74 700k very highend CP for a handheld we're never going to see one of these in here but what I've done is actually disable all the performance sces except for one we've got five efficiency cores running here and I want to show you we're only at a 12 watt TDP so every once in a while I do see it Spike up to around 13.3 uh from the BIOS I've said it as low as we can possibly go here so 12 Watts right there I mean we could go lower than this but performance just really does fall in its face when it's any lower than 12 Watts so a six core Intel CPU and checking out for remark we've got a lowprofile RTX 3506 gig model I've lowered the power as much as possible from After Burner but this is the only way that I could get the wattage down and the lowest I can get this thing to go from After Burner by lowering the power limit is around 24 watt so right here you can see our GPU power is 23.6 kind of jumps up every once in a while so in total we're talking from the GPU and CPU and that's all the power we're calculating right now now we're talking a total TDP between the CPU and GPU of 36 Watts again we're not going to come close to what the steam deck doing at 15 watts whatever they've done over there is pretty magical and you know I'd love to see a manufacturer come out and hit those kind of numbers with better performance but right now the way things are we're going to need more power to get more performance that's just how it is with these gpus and CPUs right now and another thing to keep in mind is I'm using off-the-shelf Parts with these custom chips if this ever came to fruition they could definitely get the power draw much lower than we're seeing right now but I still wanted to do some testing with this unit to show you what kind of performance this thing's putting out CPU at 12 Watts we've got that RTX 30506 gig model coming in at around 24 watts and the first game we have here is cyberpunk 2077 1080p low settings with dlss set to Quality we're seeing an average of around 71 FPS so what I want to do here is take dlss from quality to Performance and I'll tell you even on a bigger screen I have a hard time noticing dlss from quality to Balan going from No dlss 2 performance it's really hard to notice on a really nice 7-in display and with this we gained a nice little bump in performance instead of getting an average of around 71 we're seeing averages in the mid 80s so another thing to take note of is our GPU power consumption right up 21 22 Watts still right there at 12 Watts on the GPU we've got an unlocked frame rate so I'm going to go ahead and lock this at 60 and now with it locked at 60 our GPU doesn't need to work as hard rendering those extra frames that are basically unneeded in some cases now it's really great to run over 60 I completely understand that but in a handheld form factor if we can get 1080p 60 gameplay out of AAA games like this I'd be totally content with it definitely an easier one to run fors a horizon 5 but right now we're not using any kind of dlss High settings 60fps 1080p putting down this kind of performance in a handheld would be really nice but again this is all speculation we're working with off-the-shelf parts to kind of get this up and running Horizon forbidden West 900p low settings and uh this was kind of one of the harder ones to run it's definitely a newer game on the market but we're up in the mid 80s again locking all these down will allow us to draw less from a GPU here's Mortal Kombat 1 high settings 1080p with dlss set to balance on all of the AMD handhelds that I've tested so far with the 780m we do have to take this down to 900p medium settings or even 1080 low with a lot of FSR and one that's always struggled on the amdi gpus right now is po world there's no built-in FSR without doing a modification but there is dlss and it does work wonders with this game on these lower power GP use and finally going way back one of my favorite games OG Skyrim this is not the remastered version 1080p ultra settings and I really wanted to throw this in just to see how it was hitting up that GPU you can see we get kind of a maximum of around 11 Watts out of this RTX 3050 which is pretty great and yeah for handheld situations this would be awesome not drawing so much power killing that battery really fast and again this is all speculation we're using off-the-shelf Parts lowering that wattage down trying to get really low power consumption and even then with these parts we're right there to around 36 Watts total TDP across the CPU and GPU not quite what we want to see in a handheld but with a custom chip from Nvidia I think we could see that kind of performance at a lower wattage now I'm not talking 15 watts like the steam deck it will be higher and we see a lot of these handhelds on the market especially from AMD and the manufacturer state that kind of performance mode is 28 Watts if we could get there in that sweet spot with an Nvidia RTX GPU in one of these allowing us to use dlss I think it would be a game changer for the handheld Market but we're going to have to wait and see and I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments below what kind of features would you like to see in an RTX powered handheld gaming PC that's going to wrap it up for this one if you've got any questions let me know and like always thanks for watching\n"