From hotel to 30000 feet, the Micro Steam with a little help from its friends XREAL and Anker Prime keeps me up and running anywhere from 2-6 hours. Sadly Anker doesn’t quite put 100W at 20V PD sos I have lower the TDP to 45W :( (down from 60W) on the Minisforum EM680. Also, working BT ‘Virtual Battery’ to tell SteamOS how much battery is left.
Oh and running the latest SteamOS ‘Main’ with DeckyTDP.
The adhoc 10.5” IPS display and modified aftermarket MS Surface Go BT keyboard gives me the option of using a display or my XREAL glasses with tiny MinisForum EM680*. Much better performing than a MS Surface Go and with the ability to run FSR 4.1.1 and XEFG I can get between 40-60fps Quality setting in the recent AAA games I have tried (like RE9 and Death Stranding 2). The KDE desktop is close to the latest build and frankly has many features WIndows should adopt like a much better System tool and decent app repository. For most of my development needs, and what is not there, can be downloaded since my open-source tools and apps have different lInux version for easy install (sometimes a single click in Dolphin (which could do a better job with network connections to SMB servers).
I got my refurbished 32GB EM680 for $275, for $350. You could get a EM780 which has an iGPU 780M. I had posted about some time ago and did not act on upgrading to the EM780 and they sold out of the refurbished versions. Not sure if they even sell a retail 780M version anymore, but I think it was hovering around $600-$700 the last time I looked. I had really hoped they would make a Strix Point version of this with it much better energy management system then the earlier APUs.
If you are listening MiniForum, how about it?
Introducing (again) the ‘Steam Pail.”
Thanks to the latest SteamOS Recovery build that now works with more modern BIOSes, I can finally install it on the $175 TOPC miniITX board with Ryzen APU with 780M GPU. Since it was an engineering sample, I was able to reload a dev BIOS allowing me to use faster SODIMMs. Yes, tested it with FSR 4.1.1 too. I won’t because CachyOS runs really well on it.
Also, I will soon have engineering samples of tiny 180W GaN to actually install inside allowing one AC OR 11-13VDC input.
Oh, and the 10.5” panel can be detached magnetically. You know, If you to get past cafeteria monitor.
After about two hours of trying every tip and Proton & Optiscaler build I had. I finally just deleted the content out of the Bin64 folder and had Steam rebuilt it WITHOUT Optiscaler, or any of the new AMD files, including amdxcffx64.dll . I just left this in place:
PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR=1 PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1 PROTON_FSR4_RDNA3_UPGRADE=1 %command% (update: upgrade is not needed either)
AND
Enabled proton-cachyos-11.0-20260622-base-169-gaadec5e6-x86_64_v3 . The latest nightly build.
Sadly, no FSRFG 4.0.1, but 75fps 1920x1280 quality setting, as well as “Best” graphic settings is good enough for me. However, when I do enable Frame Generation, the frame-rate jumps up to 150, no watermark to indicate what frame generation is being used and there is no discernible difference in quality either. The only thing I noticed was jump in CPU percentage and increase in temp.
I will go back try it with other games, but Proton-CachyOS is making it close to single click operation if the game supports AMD out of the gate. Which for five games I have tried — the case. In fact, RE9 enabled FSRFG 4.0.1 on my RNDA 3.5 mini PC.
If you have followed some of my posts, I have always wanted to turn my miniPCs into power independent units. Which is pretty easy to do since most can work with voltage ranging from 18-22VDC, but the problem is knowing when the battery is depleted below a point to sustain power causing the miniPC shut off abruptly, potentially corrupting the O/S (Windows is notoriously sensitive to this.). So i I have been working on way to do this so that it is both accurate and low-cost (< $10 not including battery packs or Buck/Boost Regulator). Even better would be able to provide power as well as charge. I have finally found a manufacturer that has created such a module with two 140W USB-C PD outputs, with one providing the unique 20V/140W 7A output (the other is your more traditional 28V/140W USB-C PD) as well as charging at 28VDC/140W. This is allows me to power my AOOSTAR G37 - AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with 10.5” IPS touch display and increased TDP, but also provide feedback through single USB port as a HID-UPS or ‘Virtual Battery” for CachyOS or SteamOS GameMode. It is powered by two 6S2P, 21700 LiION battery packs for total of 20A surge and 420WH, that fits neatly into 6”x6”x3” housing. Total cost, about $140. I have also been testing a BlueTooth equivalent for the larger LiFPO4 batteries (how about 1100WH!) and the Anker Prime 27000mAH battery pack (giving you a compact “on the go” MiniPC capability and the Anker can be charged simultaneously as well, the only limitation is a maximum of 100W (5A), unless you use my special adapter to pair two ports on one unit, or single ports on two units.
No jabs towards Optiscaler, but it doesn’t work well with Resident Evil: Requiem. I was only getting 40fps with 4.02c INT8. Another point is I am using a Ryzen 8600G, which only has 8 channels available for the PCIe bus, but that is okay because so does the RX6600. I have another system that I am waiting to put a RX9060 (no not the XT version, but the OEM variant) if I can find one. The key is I only have 120W TDP allowance for the power system in hard-case Steam Machine.
Also, I sure hope the Steam Machine’s Sleep and hibernate work. Even on the ‘Main’ build I still can’t get it to work. Works fine when I invoke the Ryzen 8600G iGPU (remove the RX6600).
The subject and environment were all captured together using three passes with a single iPhone (Black Magic Camera app) attached to three previous adjusted MagSafe mounts on the “Splat Stick”.
This is actually two splats combined in Super Splat, the subject and environment which was created with what I am calling the “Splat Stick,” which includes three MagSafe or 1/4” mounts at different heights on 2-segment carbon fiber pole (for easier storage since it is 6’ tall) all pointed to a single POI point you adjust before the capture. You can either use three DJI or GoPro camera on a synced start/stop remote or three iPhones with similar BT remote, or Master/Slave relationship (if you have iPhone 17 Pros). You can use one camera or iPhone, but you must make three passes for new camera position (actually six, but I will get into that next). But what makes this different is you reverse your orbital direction, pointing the cameras out to capture another orbit for a total of two passes. The key is two complete, or more than 180 degrees, because COLMAP dependent on point matching, which can only be done of their is enough similarity between frames in & out, otherwise you will get two models. (COLMAP Alike also helps).
As a developer I have been intrigued by combining machine learning and photogrammetry and the fairly new method of using radiance algorithms to capture scenes with photorealism. Not only can you find many examples of this on the internet, but the company @PlayCanvas has created a new compression algorithms to make these as small as a TIFF or PNG file that can be viewed in a web browser on your PC or mobile device, even in VR, XR or AR. Also, developers are exploring the use of 3DGS in gaming engines like Unreal Engine (the one used by Expedition 33) as environments, or static models. In the video, I have combined not only an entire scene from Expedition 33, but also added animated character models from Epic, as well as custom “Meta Human” modeled after my wife, a psychotherapist, who just recently finished the game with her son acting as her mentor and coach — who wrote recently in a substack essay how it served as a means of sharing grief from losing loved ones. I had actually created this about a year ago, not really understanding myself the whole story, or how it helped them. At the time my title was “It is nice to have your therapist come along with you on your journey.”
It currently has a Mini ITX board in it with the Ryzen 8600G, but also has a PCIe 4 ext16 extender cable and custom 12V solid state switch module to power an external GPU. No not a eGPU with 7600M, but true RX6xxx, RX7xxx and RX9xxx. Seen here with an RX6700. The only caveat is it can only draw maximum 120W TDP using the Buck module to convert 19V to 12V, sadly there are no PicoATX 19V modules that provide enough amperage on their 12V bus. Actually there is one you can buy on AliExpress but it is 3X more than one you can buy stateside. So I created my own 12V bus from the 19V 300W power brick. Still you are limited to about 180W TDP with this configuration as well. In the future I will include an OEM GaN module inside the unit, allowing AC as well as DC power.
After working for days getting FSR 4.1.1 INT8 working on my 890M (RDNA 3.5) and 780M (RDNA 3.0) and my upcoming 8840 (RDNA 3.5). I now understand why they did not come out at the same time and it has to do with the slightly different architecture of RDNA 3.0 and 3.5 iGPUs pointed out here:
Key Architecture Differences:
RDNA 3
- Dedicated desktop graphics cards & standard laptops.
- Standard per-cycle output.
- Baseline vector shader execution.
- Relies on LPDDR5/GDDR6 access. (iGPUs up to 5600 MHz)
- Standard hardware-managed register caching.
- Base RDNA 3 (e.g., Radeon 780M).
- No NPU
RDNA 3.5
- Integrated graphics for mobile APUs and handheld gaming devices.
- Doubled per-cycle texel output to compensate for lower core clock speeds.
- Double rate for most rich vector shader instructions, boosting efficiency.
- Optimized specifically for LPDDR5 with enhanced batch processing and compression to save power. (up to 8000 MHz)
- Introduces software use-hint instructions (like s_singleuse_vdst) to avoid wasteful caching.
- Up to 19%-41% faster at low power budgets (e.g., Radeon 890M).
- NPU rated at 50 TOPs
In is the S_singleuse_vdst instruction and the NPU in these APUs that could be used like the RX90xx series specific machine learning FP8 matrix math, that the RDNA3 and RDNA2 cannot duplicate. The fact that the NPU shares the same “shared memory bus” as the CPU and iGPU, means one could pass off FP8 like instructions and data to the NPU which actually is capable of 16bit floating point, or even the 8 bit floating point in the CPU and iGPU, depending on the number calculated since again they share the same memory bus. No surprise because this is how Apple Metal for Mx series processors work.
So enjoy the bump in performance and quality of using FSR 4.1.1 INT8 with your RDNA 3.5 iGPUs over FSR 4 INT8, but the BEST is still to come, especially to those with Strix Halo APUs.
I have finished and testing the driver and system service send both HID UPS and USB Serial stream to be captured and pushed to driver that feeds the uPower service as Bat0. This fools CachyOS GameScope into showing battery data, such as Battery percentage, wattage drawn (total wattage at the battery), time remaining. The latter shows up fine in the GameScope quick menu, but the overlay does not show it due to Valve choosing a signed Int, that only allows for 9 hours, instead of long Int that can store a substantially longer number of seconds. Valve chose this route because they felt there wasn’t a battery withe capacity to exceed this value.
I have also found a way to add the stream from a BLE LiFePO4 battery. Just connect the bluetooth, like any other bluetooth device and it will show up as a virtual battery. This allows my 1100Wh LifePO4 with 96% efficient inverter power (I use for my Mac Mini M4) or maybe the Steam Machine with the lights go out for at a minimum of five hours at 200W. The Mac Mini, for days. :) I may even be able to read the latest Anker Prime 27000 mAH power bank as well allowing you to power your mini PC with it, with in OS warnings, suspend and clean shutdown capability, just like a handheld or laptop.
Note this has ONLY been tested on SteamOS & Catchy OS on a Mini PC with RDNA 3.0 and 3.5 APUs.
The latest AMD drop of FSR 4.1 INT 8 is not packaged in the same way as the previous leaked FSR 4.0 INT 8 as a direct replacement for ‘amd_fidelityfx_upscaler_dx12.dll’, negating the need for Optiscaler to spoof DLSS, which I could NEVER get working with REANIMAL. This meant continuing to use the less optimized FSR 4.0 INT8 dll or…
Grab the latest Proton_CachyOS drivers, select it in the ‘Compatibility’ section under your game’s Steam’s properties.
Copy the FSR 4.1 INT 8 .dll “amdxcffx64.dll” to your game’s executable directory that you would have added FSR 4 INT 8 amd_fidelityfx_upscaler_dx12.dll, or Optiscaler.
Add the following to the General Section, ‘Launch Items:’ “PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR=0 PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1 PROTON_FSR4_RDNA3_UPGRADE=1 %command%”
That’s it. Just start the game and go into settings and you will now see FSR 4.1.1 as your AMD option and FSG 4.0 as your frame generator. If you change ‘PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR=0’ to PROTON_FSR4_INDICATOR=1, it will overlay what FSR scaler has been enabled.
I get over 60fps at 1920x1280 HDR on ‘Balanced’ & ‘High’ settings on my $350 AOOSTAR AOOSTAR G-FLIP AMD R7 H255 with 780M GPU with “Death Stranding 2: The Beach”
https://owlcreek.tech/3dgs/DT2-SaminPrivateRoom/
Other splats from games here: https://owlcreek.tech/3dgs