Radeon Steam Deck 8CU vs HD 8970M

Primary details

GPU architecture, market segment, value for money and other general parameters compared.

Place in the ranking487not rated
Place by popularitynot in top-100not in top-100
Power efficiency7.05no data
ArchitectureGCN 1.0 (2012−2020)RDNA 2 (2022−2023)
GPU code nameNeptuneRDNA 2 Sephiroth
Market segmentLaptopLaptop
Release date14 May 2013 (12 years ago)9 November 2023 (1 year ago)

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores1280512
Core clock speed850 MHzno data
Boost clock speed900 MHz1900 MHz
Number of transistors2,800 millionno data
Manufacturing process technology28 nm6 nm
Power consumption (TDP)100 Wattno data
Texture fill rate72.00no data
Floating-point processing power2.304 TFLOPSno data
ROPs32no data
TMUs80no data

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Laptop sizelargeno data
InterfacePCIe 3.0 x16no data

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory typeGDDR5no data
Maximum RAM amount4 GBno data
Memory bus width256 Bitno data
Memory clock speed1200 MHzno data
Memory bandwidth153.6 GB/sno data
Shared memory-+

Connectivity and outputs

This section shows the types and number of video connectors on each GPU. The data applies specifically to desktop reference models (for example, NVIDIA’s Founders Edition). OEM partners often modify both the number and types of ports. On notebook GPUs, video‐output options are determined by the laptop’s design rather than the graphics chip itself.

Display ConnectorsNo outputsno data

API and SDK compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX12 (11_1)12_1
Shader Model5.1no data
OpenGL4.6no data
OpenCL1.2no data
Vulkan1.2.131-

Pros & cons summary


Recency 14 May 2013 9 November 2023
Chip lithography 28 nm 6 nm

Steam Deck 8CU has an age advantage of 10 years, and a 366.7% more advanced lithography process.

We couldn't decide between Radeon HD 8970M and Radeon Steam Deck 8CU. We've got no test results to judge.

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AMD Radeon HD 8970M
Radeon HD 8970M
AMD Radeon Steam Deck 8CU
Radeon Steam Deck 8CU

Other comparisons

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Community ratings

Here you can see the user ratings of the compared graphics cards, as well as rate them yourself.


4.4 46 votes

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4.4 7 votes

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