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Steam Deck OLED announced
(www.steamdeck.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If I recall the early benchmarks by The Phawx, the Deck got the best performance-per-watt around 11 W TDP. So yeah at 15 W and up, it flattens out. Pushing it harder just drains the battery for diminishing FPS returns.
I think he says the sweet spot for *800Us was closer to 18 W, but I don't remember that as clearly.
My hands-on experience with both is that the Deck sings in the 12-15 range and the stock 6800 wants to be 15-20. After that the extra heat and noise doesn't justify the gains unless you really want to play something that is just at the edge.
I only have a Deck but 9 watts has been the magic number for me. Good battery life and very little fan noise in most games. I even run RDR2 at that with Cryobyte's "prettiest" settings, and it stays darn close to 30 FPS. I may have bumped down far shadows and water a notch but honestly it still looks great.
It's definitely a matter of taste, but you still get a lot of performance per watt on the Deck between 9 and 12, so I typically prefer to crank it up a notch and aim for 35-40fps instead.
Which option is preferable probably depends on how sensitive you are to low fps vs fan noise, so there's no right answer.