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.
Rofl
They just call it “4” just to fuck with people
Steam Deck: Alyx
And it’ll be a pre-built desktop, or something.
- 2025: Steam Deck 2
- 2045: Steam Deck 3
- 2050: Steam Deck Eternal
2048: Steam Deck
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.
Apple has a new event and a new phone and a new watch EVERY YEAR. aren’t we obligated to buy all this shit every year?
Nope, my phone is 5 years old and it is nice to be able to wait for the latest release to get something brand new instead of a year or two old.
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.
I’m not sure the Steamdeck was created with the latest AAA games in mind.
BG3 co-op slows my PS5 to a crawl. People gotta be chilling with their expectations of what a £350 handheld can do.
Many people are still playing with a PS4. And generally consoles last several years.
If we can move the optimisations more to the PC world that would be also nice to keep devices running in the longer term.
What I don’t think is going to happen is a future steam deck running a native resolution at 1080p requiring much more GPU PWR.
Maybe they’ll add 1080p or higher resolution screen and start using more the upscaling.
But running a future GPU bound game natively at 1080p will make any medium term upgrade more like a downgrade.
Mind if I ask something?
What is the origin of always wanting higher and higher definitions lately?
It comes to a point where it makes no objective difference between resolutions for the human eye.
And I’ve seen TVs advertised as being “sharper and brighter than real life”. The only thing the image made for me was getting my eyes sore after staring at the screen for a few seconds.
I’m still from the time when the graphics on the cover were better than the actual graphics and that is something I don’t miss but come on… when is enough enough?
It’s easier to sell honestly. It’s a concept most people understand at a base level at least so it’s marketable.
The origin for me are the guys who generally demand that the SD should have higher resolution than 720p-800p (approximately).
I personally think the display PPI is good enough in the original Steam Deck. So I wouldn’t raise the resolution a lot. Especially when some games struggle to keep 30 FPS.
Of course, the eye to display distance matters a lot for this and that’s a bit more subjective.
At first it made sense because it gave you more detail but I think 1080p or 1440p is the perfect resolution for consuming media from a monitor or television.
For VR headsets I think it makes more sense because you need more pixel density
Don’t play big titles on the Deck. That’s not what it’s good at. Play Fez or Tunic or something. There’s a near infinite list of great games that are not technically demanding.
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.
I’d like similar things to you as well, which is for the the Deck to get more efficient per watt. On my wishlist:
- VRR
- better display
- lighter and thinner
- better airflow / cooler and quieter (but keep the new fan smell)
- better battery life without compromising size / heat
5a. alternatively, make the battery detachable so we can carry multiple around.
I want long lasting fan smell as well, i was like a feline on catnip the whole first months
However the size is fine for me, but the battery needs a serious buff
Better screen will impact the battery unfortunately
High refresh rates and VRR go hand to hand, so you’d still want that if you want VRR. You just limit the framerate to 60fps or lower if you don’t want the hit to battery life.
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 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.
I’d say while it’s possible it’s unlikely, remember that they’re running PC games, all based on X86, the work needed to make Wine/Proton run all of that well on a different CPU set is significant, and would likely break compatibility in unexpected ways, effectively bringing all the recent wins moot and bringing Proton backwards. Definitely something that will likely happen, but more of a long-term goal (unless it’s already in progress and with advances, no idea, but we would all have heard of it already if it was a thing)
there already is a project for x86 to ARM translation on Linux called box86, and there’s another one for x86_64 called box64 havent heard about them in a while but I remember seeing a video of someone playing doom 3 on a raspberry pi with it so it seems very promising
A few months ago I remember they hired a contractor for arm development, I think they were a member from the Asahi Linux project
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!”
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.
Cant you buy it on steam from Australia?
Nope. Only on the grey market. To be fair, most grey market sellers if it do have a fairly robust refund set up cos Australian law dictates they must. But some of them will make you feel like you’re trying to get blood from a stone if something goes wrong…
Another point is the steamOS is still fairly new and needs to be worked on a lot more, since it isn’t even fully utilizing the steamdeck yet, let alone ready for a new one
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.
Good. Two years is too short of a time for a hardware generation.
I agree, and tbh everything I throw at my deck, it just handles it, a play things like oxygen not included and modded minecraft, I love my deck
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.
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.
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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