Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’

The goddamn system is only a year and a half old, and is finally seeing a wider adoption. If they added a new SKU into the market, it would only confuse and piss off the people who already bought one. These stories about Steam Deck "refreshes" and "upgrades" are fucking stupid, and I hope the shithouses that put them out don't get any review units when the real one finally does hit the market.

The Steam Deck adds something incredibly valuable that the PC market has never had: a consistent target spec for minimum hardware requirements. Upgrading every couple years would create confusion for which version for developers to focus on. They are treating it like a console, not a PC.

We all know there won't be a Deck 3. So I hope they take their time on making the second one perfect.

I'm glad they are not rushing a new one out until there is some genuine leap in the tech. I think we have become accustomed to pointless upgrades every year which offer nothing substantial other than lining some shareholders pockets.

In my case the longer they take the better 😊

I think this is healthy. People (including myself) are easily sucked into consumerism instead of sustainability.

Better to have a good device that is highly repairable, upgradeable, and modable. That way you can make small improvements and add some high quality accessories without just trying to force everybody to buy the newest shiny device every 18-24 months.

Unless you're only playing the latest AAA games, the Deck will perform great for many years to come.

I got sucked down the hype/consumerism hole for many years after college, and I blew so much money on buying every new PC part and accessory even though I didn't need any of them.

That's good. A Steam Deck 2 might make sense once there's an APU with double the performance at the same 15W.

Current APU's are faster per watt, but only at higher power consumption. This means either the battery life sucks, or the handheld is too heavy and expensive with a giant battery.

The current handhelds by other manufacturers are faster, but only a bit. 120Hz are nice, but I don't even reach 60fps on most titles and it consumes too much power. Games might perform a bit better but everything is still also playable on the SD, so there's no real point in releasing a second generation. All these devices fill the same niche.

What I expect is a refresh of the SD with an OLED display. Maybe even with VRR and HDR, now that SteamOS has support for it. Farther down the wish list are hall effect joysticks.

As an Australian, I’m not expecting a Steam Deck at all.

It's still fulfilling its role well. Meanwhile, the Index is getting pretty old compared to current-gen VR headsets. It's still a fantastic headset, but it would be nice to have something smaller, lighter, and wireless.

Bigscreen's Beyond headset should be looked at as something the next wave of VR headsets should strive for.

Good. Two years is too short of a time for a hardware generation.

Idc about steam deck 2 because I've already got a steam deck I'm happy with.

good, I'm sick of companies being like "hey here's the new version of insert product that worked in every category here, as such as are not supporting the old device anymore, but don't worry the new version has sparkles on the menus!"

The only thing I wish they had done is an OLED screen.

I'm not after a Steam Deck v2, but I'd love a v1.1 with Thunderbolt support. I'll buy a Steam Deck the moment it will happily play with an eGPU without a Dremel getting involved.

I wonder whether, when the faster Steam Deck 2 comes, it may have ditched the x86 architecture altogether and leapt to a high-performance ARM CPU, yielding more power per watt and generating less heat. If so, that would presumably require Proton to be supplemented with a Rosetta-style translation engine that can convert x86 machine code into ARM.

Currently, outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.

Honestly this is a good thing, IMO. If we ever want devs to optimize for a given device, they need to know that it won't be obsolete immediately. Hopefully seeing that Valve isn't rushing to make a new device will give them confidence in that.

The only upgrade I expect for newer iterations of 1st gen SteamDeck is a more efficient APU providing the same performance to prolong battery runtime.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Now, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge and CNBC that it could be late 2025 or beyond before it raises that bar — because it wants to see a leap in performance without a significant hit to battery life.

Griffais credits “a targeted optimization effort in the Mesa radv Vulkan driver by our graphics driver team” to support unusual features like ExecuteIndirect, explaining that Valve learned how to optimize a similar GPU-driven rendering pipeline when it added support for Halo Infinite.)

All that said, Valve might totally still have a Steam Deck refresh in the works that doesn’t change the performance floor.

Screen and battery are the top pain points both Griffais and fellow designer Lawrence Yang want to address in a Steam Deck sequel, too, they told me in late 2022.

Or perhaps it just waits, and Valve’s mystery Galileo / Sephiroth turns out to be the long-awaited SteamVR standalone headset.

There’s also a theory that maybe Galileo is a Steam living room PC that can beam graphics to a headset, but Griffais threw some cold water on that idea last week.

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Its fast enough just give me some usb4 so I can use an egpu.

I'd be happy to have the option to buy the first edition (from Valve and not a grey import with zero warranty) in Australia.

My deck is about to reach it's final form and I need a few years out of it. So far I've done

2TB ssd hall effect joysticks Transparent green shell front and back. played around with undervolting/ over clocking replaced screen with anti glare (only because I broke it)

I'm waiting on a beefier heatsink and I'd like to find some cool buttons.

The only other thing left to do would be try the 32GB RAM swap that some madlad did. I'm not really interested in the deck HD screen but could get behind a 800p or 1600p OLED panel.

Oh shit son…Deckard could be a standalone VR headset then

All I need from Valve is confirmation a Steam Deck 2 will exist - I don't care how many years in the future that is. I just want to know if this is a "let's quickstart the PC handheld market, here, take this as an example and go nuts" versus "this is now a hardware category we are invested in, we will make new units"

I’m so happy to hear this. I’m getting a steam deck next week and have been wired that a faster version would be right around the corner.

I can't imagine they'd be able to use an off the shelf processor for the next one. The performance at lower wattages on the deck is so much better than current laptop processors or the Z1.

The next one will be 1080p and I can't see the battery life and cost being right for yeah a couple years.

I just want to be able to use a password manager with Steam for online games.

It makes total sense. Just a bit of a bummer when looking at the reality of devs being awful/not caring about optimising their games. The Deck is just barely hanging on with this year's big titles.

Thankfully, there's plenty of older and/or more lightweight options out there.

How hard would it be to just melt the i7 or wherever out of there and drop in the i34 or whatever in a few years?

Has anyone gotten jtag or anything yet?

Of fucking course not. They are taking a bath internally on every single one.

I loved my steak deck, but I sold it and got a ROG Ally, it's better in every way and makes me wonder why Valve is just letting other companies run away with their idea.