The Steam Deck has revolutionized the gaming scene, allowing players to dive into AAA games right from the comfort of their beds with just a handheld device. Gamers and tech enthusiasts have been abuzz about the possibility of a Steam Deck 2, especially considering the rapid advancements in the APU industry over the last five years. Yet, Valve has been clear that we shouldn’t get too excited just yet. According to an interview with Reviews.org, they’re holding out for a “generational leap in compute” before releasing a new version.
AMD’s RDNA architecture has made significant strides beyond its previous Vega offerings, delivering impressive performance and better driver support. With the release of RDNA 2, Valve teamed up with AMD to craft a custom chip for the Steam Deck, famously referred to as Van Gogh.
The APU in the original Steam Deck boasted four Zen 2 cores alongside an eight Compute Unit-based RDNA 2 iGPU. Both components have roots going back to 2020. Even with last year’s enticing OLED update, we didn’t see any major performance enhancements.
AMD’s latest innovation, the Strix Point APUs (Ryzen AI 300), are based on the groundbreaking Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 technologies. When asked about the prospects of a successor, Steam Deck’s designer Lawrence Yang remarked, “It’s important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear; we’re not pursuing a yearly cycle.”
Valve’s strategy seems to echo the more measured approaches of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. For instance, the brand-new PS5 Pro still utilizes the older Zen 2 architecture. Although the handheld gaming sector has evolved, with companies like Intel entering the fray with their Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) CPUs, the advancements haven’t reached a level that justifies a new Steam Deck iteration just yet. “We really want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we release the true second generation of the Steam Deck,” Yang elaborated.
On the technical front, today’s APUs aren’t much faster at consuming less than 15 watts than those from the era of Rembrandt (Ryzen 6000 Mobile). Lunar Lake’s design choices represent progress, but Valve deems these steps insufficient. Therefore, the eventual release of the Steam Deck 2 could signify a substantial upgrade in both performance and battery life. Furthermore, Valve is exploring an ARM64 version of Proton, suggesting that incorporating Arm cores with a GPU solution from Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA, similar to the Nintendo Switch, might be an option for the future.
