When the Steam Deck made its debut, it marked a significant shift in gaming by allowing players to enjoy blockbuster titles right from the comfort of their beds using a nifty handheld device. Gamers and tech enthusiasts now find themselves eagerly awaiting a potential Steam Deck 2, especially given the significant advancements in the APU industry over the last several years. However, Valve has set the record straight: we shouldn’t expect a Steam Deck 2 to grace store shelves anytime soon. As revealed in an interview with Reviews.org, Valve insists that it’ll wait for a “generational leap in compute” before launching the next iteration.
The jump from AMD’s older Vega architecture to the RDNA series was transformative, offering drastically improved performance and better driver support. Specifically, Valve partnered with AMD to develop a custom chip, dubbed Van Gogh, for the Steam Deck, utilizing the RDNA 2 platform.
The Steam Deck’s processing unit packs four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2-integrated GPU with eight compute units. Both technologies have been around since about 2020. Even with the OLED update that came out last year, we didn’t see any leaps in performance like some might have hoped.
When asked about future developments, Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang highlighted AMD’s newest Strix Point APUs, built on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5. He was candid about Valve’s approach, stating, “We aren’t adopting an annual release cycle like clockwork.”
Valve appears to be taking cues from the strategies employed by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Despite various strides in the handheld market, and even with Intel hopping in with its Lunar Lake CPUs, the improvements aren’t groundbreaking enough to warrant rushing out a Steam Deck 2. “We need that big leap in computation power without compromising on battery life before releasing a true second generation of the Steam Deck,” Yang emphasized.
Diving a bit deeper into the technical side, today’s APUs haven’t significantly outpaced their predecessors from the Rembrandt era, at least not at the sub-15W power levels where efficiency matters. While Intel’s Lunar Lake design choices are promising, if Valve considers them still lacking, the eventual Steam Deck 2 might promise substantial boosts in performance and battery longevity. Meanwhile, Valve is also exploring an ARM64 version of Proton, hinting that future models could potentially use Arm cores coupled with a GPU from the likes of Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA—a strategy reminiscent of the Nintendo Switch.
