The Steam Deck has truly changed the way we enjoy gaming, allowing fans to dive into AAA experiences from the comfort of their own bed with a handheld device. Many in the gaming community are buzzing with anticipation for a sequel, a potential Steam Deck 2. This excitement comes on the heels of huge advancements in the APU industry over the past few years. However, Valve has set the record straight through an interview with Reviews.org, explaining that a Steam Deck 2 won’t be on store shelves until there’s a significant technological leap in computing power.
In terms of hardware innovations, AMD’s RDNA architecture has been a game-changer, greatly outpacing its previous Vega offerings in terms of both performance and driver support. When RDNA 2 rolled out, Valve teamed up with AMD to craft a custom chip for the Steam Deck, known by its code name, Van Gogh.
The current Steam Deck sports an APU with four Zen 2 cores paired with an RDNA 2 iGPU armed with eight Compute Units. Both of these architectures trace back to around 2020. Even when Valve revamped the device with an OLED display last year, performance enhancements were conspicuously missing.
Today’s APUs, like AMD’s latest Strix Point models (Ryzen AI 300), are built on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5. But when questioned about the future lineup, Steam Deck lead designer Lawrence Yang emphasized, “We are committed, and we’ve made it clear that we’re not sticking to an annual release schedule.”
Valve seems to be following the strategy of gaming giants like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Even with the introduction of the PS5 Pro, it still relies on the older Zen 2 architecture. Observations of the handheld industry show advancements, and Intel is entering the fray with its Lunar Lake CPUs (Core Ultra 200V). Despite these developments, they’re not enough to warrant a new Steam Deck just yet. As Yang puts it, “We need to see a leap in computational power that doesn’t compromise battery life before we launch a true second-generation Steam Deck.”
Looking under the hood, today’s APUs don’t perform much faster at sub-15W power levels than those with Rembrandt (Ryzen 6000 Mobile) did. Though Lunar Lake demonstrates promising design steps forward, it’s still not quite what Valve is looking for. Whenever the Steam Deck 2 finally arrives, it might boast significant improvements in both slashing down energy use and bumping up performance. An enticing possibility is Valve’s ongoing work on an ARM64 version of Proton. This might lead to marrying Arm cores with a GPU solution from Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA, similar to the setup we see in the Nintendo Switch.
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