Valve Delays Steam Deck 2 Release Until Significant Performance Leap Occurs

The Steam Deck has truly transformed the gaming landscape, making it possible to dive into AAA games comfortably from bed with a handheld device. Since its release, gamers and tech fans have been eagerly speculating about a possible Steam Deck 2, especially given the leaps and bounds made in the APU sector over recent years. However, Valve has been quite candid about their plans, indicating that a new version won’t hit the market until we see a “generational leap in compute,” as they mentioned in an interview with Reviews.org.

The collaboration between Valve and AMD resulted in the custom chip for the Steam Deck, codenamed Van Gogh, built on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture. This was already a significant step up from their previous Vega offerings, boasting better performance and enhanced driver support. The first Steam Deck featured an APU with four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2 iGPU with eight compute units, both architectures that have been around since 2020. Despite a recent OLED refresh, there hasn’t been much progression in terms of performance boosts.

Taking a look at AMD’s newest Strix Point APUs, these are based on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5. When asked about the prospects of a successor to the Steam Deck, Lawrence Yang from Valve stated, “It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence.” This suggests that Valve is adopting a strategy similar to that of gaming giants like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Even the latest PS5 Pro sticks with the older Zen 2 architecture. While there are improvements in the handheld gaming space, such as Intel’s entry into the fray with its Lunar Lake CPUs, these advancements aren’t quite compelling enough to prompt the release of a Steam Deck 2 just yet. Yang elaborated by saying, “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.”

Looking deeper into the tech, it appears that current APUs at sub-15W power levels aren’t much faster than their predecessors from the Rembrandt era. Intel’s Lunar Lake makes some promising strides due to its innovative design, but even that might not meet Valve’s expectations for the Steam Deck 2. What’s intriguing is Valve’s work on an ARM64 version of Proton, which opens up the possibility of utilizing ARM cores with a GPU from Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA, akin to what the Nintendo Switch employs.

While we wait for that next big step, Valve is clearly focused on ensuring that any follow-up to the Steam Deck truly offers a leap forward in performance and battery efficiency.