The exact quote:
It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.
My biggest concern with SteamDeck was that it would become a 1-2 year upgrade cycle device. I don’t expect the hardware to last 7+ years like normal console lifecycles but I’m very glad to hear they’re being patient and aggressively supporting the software side.
It’s kind of just becoming an indie or old game portable pc to me. Don’t personally have much interest in playing modern graphically demanding titles on it.
I’m the same. I play retro and indie titles on the Deck, and more modern and demanding games on the desktop.
I was really surprised how well Hellblade 2 ran on mine. And supposedly Until Dawn also runs well now. When you can live with 30fps I suspect that well crafted games will be playable for a few more years.
Was it ever intended or fit for that? It’s 2.5 years old, where modern games 2.5 years ago that much less demanding than modern games today?
2.5 years ago there were a lot more games still targeting last gen consoles as their minimum baseline. Newer games that are current gen consoles only tend to fare a lot worse on steam deck.
I think the goal was to be able to physically run some version of modern AAA titles when it came out. Although generally, those titles would be downgraded graphically and run at a low frame rate, making it a less than ideal situation for those with alternative options.
It’s an excellent thin client as well. I’ve played the second half of death stranding through the free tier of Geforce Now.
I dunno, I expect the Deck to last far longer than the average console if anything. It’s a PC, so the games are pretty much guaranteed to keep coming for decades to come, as they have for decades past.
The hardware will fall behind, so I think the point where the newest Triple A games won’t be playable will come within a few years, but I bet whatever visual novels or pixelated indie games release in 2035 will still run just fine on it.
Plus, it’s designed to be repairable, unlike most consoles. And even if Valve stops maintaining SteamOS for the Steam Deck, you’ll still be able to install other distros, so software support isn’t something I’m very concerned about either.
Two thoughts.
- Space marine 2 didn’t work well so I’m assuming that spankin new games will be hit or miss from here on out.
- AAA games have sucked lately. ive played so many good games on my deck that I may have missed on a larger system.
Shoot. My back log on games is so big, I can be happy with this one for another 5 years before I’d need something with more power.
Yeah same. I got a steam deck maybe six months ago, my backlog is so big I’ve only recently finished bioshock. Seems like a nifty little device and it seems to handle contemporary stuff okay too.
I’m really looking forward to playing the 2016 (ish?) version of Spiderman here in the next year or so.
Or any new game :D
There are a ton of PC gamers who think the only way to play a video game is 1440p 60-144fps and anything below that is unplayable. The reality is the steam deck is a 720p 30fps handheld device that can occasionally make it to 60fps if pushed far enough.
IMHO a device that can run a game like God of war Ragnarok at 30fps in handheld mode and still play fine when docked is succeeding on the performance front in several aspects. In comparison, the switch version of Wolfenstein the new Colossus had to remove entire sets of geometry to even hit 30fps where the deck can hit that easily with the same settings without removing geometry and using AMD FSR. I think the deck has at least 3 more years in it before we even start to see any needed upgrades at that performance. Only time will tell.
The steamdeck seriously changed my perspective of what power I need for a computer and convinced me that I can continue to run my 1080ti for at least a few more years.
1080’ties really were legendary cards. Back then I only had a 1060ti as my prior card broke unexpectedly and that was all the money I could spare.
Completely agree! When this bad boy gets retired it is getting disassembled and placed in a shadow box for display.
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Yes but that 1440p 144hz is on a 27 inch display on a stationary computer. Why do you think people that prefer that are mutually exclusive with people that are fine with less for a mobile device with a 7 inch display and a battery?
It 100% could, everyone thinks they need to be able to generate kratos’ abs, Cloud’s spikes and Keanu…but they don’t. (Removed an extra an)
Agreed. FSR 3 really is amazing and I’d gladly use that to pull a few more years of playing my favorite games on 720p low.
Upscalers are great for portables I just hope it’s not used to excuse poor optimization.
That said I only play fps on my desktop, the steam deck opens up an entirely different class of games for me.
Honestly can’t see that happening. I think valve will want each upgrade to be significant enough you can feel it
Good. Keeping it the same means that the original Steam Deck will remain a target device for game developers for longer.
A desperately needed view in an industry of fashionable e-waste. Apple, Google and now Microsoft: I’m looking at you
Number must go up
Presumably this will mean a high-performance ARM CPU (comparable to the Apple M series), along with the dynamic recompilation technology Steam have been experimenting with. (It’s unlikely that Intel or AMD will deliver the generational leap they’re talking about.)
This reminds me of an old thread on a random forum. Just when Sims 2 was released they were speculating what Sims 3 would look like.
Someone suggested that the next game will surely be in the source engine!
While your point is more realistic than that I still don’t think valve could pull this off in reasonable time. Translation for games is extremely hard to do right. I think if at all there will be another generation of decks before we see something like this.
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I wouldn’t count AMD out. The whole reason the Steam Deck is so successful is because of AMDs Mobile GPU, not necessarily it’s CPU. AMD has been able to make some very efficient GPUs lately, so I do belive with a couple new architectures and die shrinks we will get the generational leap they’re talking about.
ARM sounds nice, and it might one day be, but getting x86 translation working flawlessly WITHOUT performance/battery costs at the same time as proton is just asking a heck of a lot.
ARM does best when it’s doing ARM things. Since all games are built for x86 with nobody having any intention of compiling for native ARM, I don’t really see the point. The whole reason i like the Steam Deck is to play older back catalog games, and those are all x86. Apple pulls it off because they only translate x86 when they have to.
Dynamic recompilation technology?
It’s “FEX”, Valve have apparently been testing it with Proton.
The Asahi Linux team have their own packaging/tooling around it, but theirs is slower at runtime because they have to run the games inside a VM as well.
Their stack is so brutal. It’s incredible how they overcame it all.
ARM instruction set, wrong page size, GPU without documentation for which they reverse engineered a Vulkan and OpenGL driver.
They’ve done some amazing work.
I think we’ll get at least one more x86 Steam Deck generation before it moves to ARM (if it moves to ARM at all).
The Snapdragon X isn’t anything to write home about when it comes to efficiency under load, with the newest CPUs (with iGPUs) from AMD and Intel keeping up or maybe even exceeding it.
I honestly think (hope) valve should take a shot at a genuine console. I would absolutely love something that just WORKS like steam deck, but unlike my PS5 syncs with my steam library and can easily transition to my deck with no fuss. Library compatibility, graphic customization, capable of functioning as a one stop media device for the TV room. I feel like the steam machines were too early and too short sighted/compartmentalized, but now that so many games are coming to PC, valve could take everything the PlayStation 5 did right, while removing all the bullshit that drives people nuts.
A new take on the Steam Machine could potentially knock Xbox out of the market in their current state, and I’m okay with that.
Steam machines were a great idea that the market wasn’t quite ready for, and were too niche at the time. The steam deck has proved people of all technical levels are ready and willing to embrace a non-windows OS, and don’t care what it is as long as it can easily give them access to their content. I have an Nvidia shield, a PS5, a steam deck and a desktop PC. My game library is disjointed and I rarely play anything on the PC, because there is no good way to make it convenient. The vast majority of the time I use my steam deck, I’m sitting on my couch, just like my PS5 .
A steam console could unify everything, cut my devices while simplifying my experience and giving me way more control over the invasive bullshit that comes with streaming and android devices. That has so much upside and value to me, it’s hard to even put a price tag on it tbh.
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Yes I am that people. A gaming console media PC that sits still, has rest mode, and can interface with a server for my media, or run streaming apps like a regular ass PC but from the convenience of my couch. Like basically - my steam deck with a hardware upgrade at the expense of portability. That’s exactly what I want and I would happily pay for. Even at $700+, that value is there for me and I imagine for tons of others.
That’s just a gaming PC man. Install steam big picture or whatever its called and voila
It’s literally not, that’s steam running in big picture on an inconvenient setup. No controller wake up, no rest mode, stuck with windows, no convenient app switching, need mouse/kb to do anything outside of steam. Source: have gaming PC that I never use.
Yeah. I could figure out how to make a PC do all that, but I would rather pay for a Steam console that does all of that for me out of the box.
But why limit this to console only, when this will be a full featured PC that can do so much more. Plus there are plenty of open source streaming tools like Moonlight and sunshine that can stream your game directly to your TV. You have Jellyfin for media streaming etc.
Because I don’t need or want it to do any of that, nor do most people that purchase a console. I want it to be a steam-friendly PS5 replacement, and serve the exact role that a console serves. A steam-friendly replacement would have the same OS features that deck has, and allow a similar degree of customization. You are not the use case if you don’t understand that.
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Nothing yet surpassed Zen2 low power efficiency in the SD. And by low power I mean under 10W power/performance.
New chips scale quite a bit better above 10W though.
Also I’m not sure if that’s actually the HW limitation or just Valve tuning of the power behaviour. It’s possible they can throw in Zen5 and tune it to that efficiency level while getting significant performance uplift over Zen2 at the same power.
Regarding GPU we will need much faster memory support to get any significant advantages even with RDNA4 as most iGPUs are starved for memory bandwidth anyways, not saying that RDNA4 wouldn’t be an improvement, just that it won’t be as big as a leap as it could be with faster memory.
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Qualcomm is Snapdragon, and that’s ARM, which means half of your games will crash at random in the first 30 seconds or not boot at all
Intel has not done what you claim they have
Intel is claiming that with the upcoming Arrow Lake series of CPUs will seriously cut down the power budget. Important clarifications on that, the TDP of Arrow Lake is still around 150W TDP but that doesn’t mean it’ll pull the full 150W all the time, and wait for third-party benchmarks before believing anything they say. Still if what they’re claiming is half true mobile devices could be getting a huge boon.
It doesn’t always scale down though. There’s always an efficiency curve so we really can’t speculate. I agree, we have to wait and see.
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As was already mentioned, I’m not discussing ARM. ARM has its own issues with compatibility on top of the Windows to Linux compatibility.
Not sure what you mean by Intel. MSI Claw showed quite abysmal performance at low power vs SD. Regrading their newest chips, I have no clue as of right now.
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I think you need to take a step back and ask if ARM makes sense if you’re translating x86 instructions 100% of the time. Unless you’re hoping people will develop new games for ARM and you won’t use your SD to play existing titles much, but that seems like a 180° shift to me.
Just to add as we are discussing mainly ARM vs x86 now… that is just a small part of the whole device. Just look at the SD OLED vs LCD. They managed to have OLED screen that is significantly better than the LCD one while using less power on AVG which is a huge deal to battery life and it either allows you to compensate with more power to SOC to achieve better performance at the same battery life or take the saving and go with higher battery life… and that’s just screen.
Then they optimized the PCB layout, PCB components, etc… to get both better cooling and efficiency.
I think that what is currently holding them back is both the SOC available and the actual efficiency of given parts combined. Getting improvement in both areas at once will lead to a significant change but one or the other alone will not tip the scales towards significant upgrade.
I dunno, I think you may be underestimating ARM here. I’ve heard that the overhead from translating the machine code is a lot lower than you might think, because so much X86 code is optimized down to a RISC-like subset of the instruction set already. And if that overhead isn’t too daunting in the common cases, the more robust power management on the ARM side of the chip market might be able to make up the difference in a handheld environment for most users. Obviously it’s a huge amount of work to nail the software, and it would be on top of the work they were already doing on Linux, so I’m not saying it’ll definitely be in the next iteration, but I could definitely imagine it happening eventually.
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Yes it did not have Lunar Lake to which I said “Regrading their newest chips, I have no clue as of right now.” because we really don’t have any significant testing done at low power for these chips for gaming to compare with SD.
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It’s a completely different discussion if you throw ARM into the mix.
And given some recent news about Valve working on an ARM emulator and funding Arch Linux to help them start supporting ARM as well they might be working towards that. Though if that is for the deck 2 or something else further in the future is yet to be seen.
It’s rumored to be for new standalone VR.
But, well, future is a long time, especially on Valve Time. ;)
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surprisingly not most of the time I checked.
Laptop/Mobile x86 seemed rather competetive to Laptop/Mobile ARM in performance/Watt
Well, let me rephrase it: it’s a completely different discussion if you want to run Windows games on ARM without ridiculous performance losses due to translation from x86.
Until we get Proton running with near-native speeds on ARM like on x86 perf/watt isn’t really that important.
I just sold my 4090 after playing some latest hit AAA games I didn’t like at all and I play only indies on deck, it’s the best gaming device ever
Also it seems the only games I liked from hundreds of aaa graphics eye candies from recent years are rdr2 and cyberpunk and bg3. I unironically think there are fewer great big aaa games nowadays cmv and I am not planning another xx90 card any time soon
I’d like to get a Steam Deck but was wondering if it’s getting close to a newer, better version coming soon. This makes me feel more comfortable, not that I have the budget for one right now anyway.
It would be a real shame that they moved onto the next big thing while the Steam Deck is not even widely available.
It’s not what makes them money so they don’t really have the business incentive for maximizing hardware sales that leads to a relentless pushing out of new versions of their hardware that are barely better than the last one and all manner of tricks for early obsolescence of older devices (things like purposeful OS and App under-performance and even incompatibility with older versions of the hardware).
Also in the big picture of gaming the Steam Deck is tiny and in its early stages, so business-wise is not the time to go down a strategy of relentless new hardware versions and enshittification, quite the opposite.
Absolutely, they’re doing the right thing and as the right thing aligns with their business objectives it’s a bit wishful thinking to claim its because they care so much about their customers as people.
The one “generational leap” I want, and have wanted for decades, is the ability to upgrade hardware, like modular laptops can. It’s great that they aren’t doing little incremental upgrades, but between generations, games come out that would work but need a little more RAM or something, and instead of having to wait another 2 years and spending $1000 on a new console when it comes out, you could just shove more RAM in it in the meantime.
Never in my life have I regretted putting more RAM into my computers. When faced with deciding between similarly priced graphics cards going with the higher RAM option was always the right choice in the long run. Because higher resolution textures always make an otherwise low game look great.
If I knew an adventurous spirit with great soldering skills and greater insurance I would go for the 32 GB upgrade on my Deck.
I bought the parts for that, install pending time off.
Godspeed. o7
Main downside is that having swappable components adds size and cost, which is why laptops are so much less modular than full size PCs. For something like the Deck, which is trying to be as small and cheap as possible, I doubt we’ll see anything modular for a long time.
Valve could possibly sell upgraded motherboards that you could use with your original screen/etc. However before ifixit sold deck parts, there was a leak of the upcoming parts and prices. At the time, replacement motherboards were planned to be sold, but they planned to sell the motherboard for $350 (when the cheapest deck was $400). Ultimately they ended up never selling the motherboard, which makes sense when considering how expensive it was compared to the overall price of the unit.
Regarding size, the steamdeck already has an M.2 for storage, and a CAMM2 module for ram would take about the same amount of space as a second M.2 drive. The only other major thing for repairability/upgradability would be less glue on the battery and threaded inserts, which doesn’t add size.
The only other major thing for repairability/upgradability would be less glue on the battery and threaded inserts, which doesn’t add size.
The glue was reduced on later versions and especially on the OLED version which also got threaded inserts. So those are already done and I doubt the next version would regress in that regard.
Might sound kind of stupid, but one thing I’d personally love for the steam deck would be the ability to detach the display from the controls on each side like the Nintendo switch so I could use it like a small tablet in portrait mode. You can already do that, but it’s awkward and bulky.
I’d actually use it for browsing the web on desktop mode and I could probably get rid of my android tablet.
Nah. One big piece let’s them fit more excellent inside.
Can you use an external controller, and a stand of some kind?
Understandable.
What I will say though is that I personally wouldn’t mind regular spec bumps at all. The Deck isn’t exactly a cheap device and to get the “latest and greatest” for your “investment” at any given point of purchase would help longevity.
But as I said, in this case it makes a lot of sense (for Valve). SteamOS is still under heavy development, even more basic stuff such as the update mechanism and also power management is something they’re still working to improve.
They also use a custom APU designed in collaboration with AMD, and these designs cost a lot of money. It’s not just a rebranded 7840U like the Z1 Extreme for example. This custom design makes a lot of sense in terms of focusing on gaming performance and efficiency, and it clearly shows in (very) power limited scenarios.
Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a new Steam Deck based on Zen 5 and RDNA 4 with another custom designed APU sometime in 2025 or early 2026. Zen 2 is really starting to show its age and Zen 5 is a solid leap even over Zen 4 (not talking about desktop CPUs here, but Ryzen AI 300). RDNA 4 will likely improve quite a bit over RDNA 3(.5) (with the current Deck having RDNA 2) and include some type of hardware-accelerated machine learning upscaling with FSR4, which could make a lot of sense on the Deck as long as enough games support it.
I’d also like to see a few other improvements. The OLED display is great in many aspects, but VRR would be a great feature to have. Internally I’d like to see an easier way to swap the battery, maybe using similar tech to what Apple does with the iPhone 16’s battery. Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck, but it’ll also be the most common a few years down the line when all these batteries really start to show their age.
Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck,
Is it really? I know there’s some glue holding the battery itself, but otherwise my understanding is that the battery is really easy to access.
iFixit rates it “Difficult” for the Steam Deck OLED and says the time required is 2-3 hours:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+OLED+Battery+Replacement/168676
This is a slight improvement from the original Deck’s estimated 2-4 hours:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/149070
It requires removing quite a few parts but the most annoying part is getting rid of the adhesive. It doesn’t have easy-to-access pull tabs or whatever.
They can certainly improve this. Either add pull tabs to the adhesive strips, or better yet use the mechanism from the iPhone 16 where you apply voltage to the adhesive to make dissolve/no longer stick. Or even better make it a screw-in battery without any glue whatsoever. Then update the routing of several cables so they aren’t in the way of removing the battery.
I honestly hope they wait as long as possible. I want the leap to be a huge difference for a steam deck 2.
