The arrival of the Steam Deck marked an exciting new chapter in gaming, offering the ability to play AAA games from the comfort of your bed on a handheld device. Many gamers are buzzing with excitement about a potential Steam Deck 2, especially given the impressive advancements in APU technology over the past few years. However, Valve has made it clear that we’re not likely to see a Steam Deck 2 until there’s a significant leap in computing technology, as they mentioned in a chat with Reviews.org.
The RDNA architecture from AMD vastly outperformed its predecessor, Vega, in terms of performance and driver support. Utilizing this technology, Valve teamed up with AMD to create a custom chip for the Steam Deck, known as Van Gogh.
The Steam Deck’s APU is comprised of four Zen 2 cores along with an eight Compute Unit RDNA 2 integrated GPU, based on technology from around 2020. Even with last year’s OLED update, there weren’t any notable improvements in performance.
(Image credit: Valve)
AMD’s latest Strix Point APUs (Ryzen AI 300) are built on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5. When asked about a new version of the Steam Deck, Lawrence Yang, a designer for Steam Deck, commented, “It’s crucial for us, and we’ve been quite upfront that we’re not following an annual release schedule.”
Valve seems to be taking a page out of the playbook from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Even the PS5 Pro keeps to the older Zen 2 architecture. Despite advancements in handheld tech, with Intel stepping in with its Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) CPUs, none of these warrant a Steam Deck 2 yet. Yang elaborated, "We genuinely aim to wait for a significant computing upgrade without compromising battery life before we release the true second generation of the Steam Deck."
On a more technical note, today’s APUs aren’t much faster at sub-15W power levels compared to the Rembrandt era (Ryzen 6000 Mobile). While Lunar Lake shows promise, it may not be enough for Valve, suggesting the next Steam Deck will indeed offer a big jump in performance and battery life. Valve is also working on an ARM64 variant of Proton, which means using Arm cores alongside Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU solutions could be an avenue, similar to the Nintendo Switch.
