There's a relatively niche segment of the PC gaming population that really wants to push the envelope in graphics. I think most PC gamers like gaming on their PC because it is a very open platform that allows them to play games they bought the 90s, all sorts of mods, games from random nobodies on the internet, the latest games, and also emulate a wide variety of game systems and computers.
Based on my experience, people wanting to play games which are over 20 years old are much more of a niche crowd than those using beefy GPUs. Obviously, few people have RTX 3080/3090 levels of investment, but based on Steam statistics, mid-tier cards from a few years back like the GTX 1060, RTX 2060/2070, and RX 580 are all near the top of the most recent steam surveys.
Certainly the Steam surverys support the notion that the people who won't shut up about $1,000 graphics cards are very much a minority in PC gaming. They eat up all the oxygen in the room, but they certainly aren't the actual majority of the group.
This is directly from valve. It's probably what Valve looks at when making these decisions. I assume this APU is relatively similar to the 1060 in power? Maybe the 1050. But I haven't seen any benchmarking around the APU.
The APU is certainly not slower than a PS4, it has Zen 2 cores. The GPU might have fewer flops but it has a much newer architecture, so it could easily be faster. Just comparing flops across different architectures isn't an accurate way of determining GPU gaming performance.
Do you expect this 15W APU to be faster than full TDP Desktop AMD Ryzen 5700G? The "Fastest Integrated Graphics Ever" 13 days ago https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-7-5700g-review? 5700G reaches GTX760 parity in some games like Witcher3, while in others like Overwatch its medium for APU while dedicated gpu runs same framerate at Ultra.
It'll be interesting to see. RDNA2 is definitely a significant upgrade over Vega. Also I would assume most of that desktop TDP goes towards the CPU. The LPDDR5 RAM will also help the GPU in the Steam Deck.
>I think most PC gamers like gaming on their PC because it is a very open platform that allows them to play games they bought the 90s
This is just not true. Most pc gamers are playing free to play competitive multiplayer games. Think league of legends, fortnite, call of duty warzone, and hearthstone. The people playing these games care about framerate for competitive reasons which means they need good gpus.
For me personally, PC gaming is all about being able to play anything from multiplayer FPSs to moddable content to random indie games in my web-browser to emulated games from the early 90s to keyboard-centric roguelikes. Ie, more about having a vast backward-compatible library and the ability to hack on the games for fun than about cutting edge graphics.
There are various game genres (flight sims, real-time strategy, simulation games like Factorio and Kerbal Space Program) that just don't fit the console + controller paradigm. Individually, the niches may be small but together they're not insignificant.
Why? I thought PC gaming is about powerful graphics cards you can't have pretty much anywhere else.