The arrival of the Steam Deck marked a significant shift in gaming, allowing players to delve into AAA games comfortably from their handheld devices in bed. Gamers everywhere, along with tech enthusiasts, have been buzzing with excitement at the thought of a Steam Deck 2, especially considering the immense advancements in the APU world over the past few years. Yet, Valve has been upfront about the fact that we won’t see a sequel device until there’s a substantial “generational leap in compute,” as shared in a chat with Reviews.org.
AMD’s leap from its Vega to RDNA architecture was a game-changer, offering not only better performance but also improved driver support. Working closely with AMD, Valve introduced a custom chip for the Steam Deck, known as Van Gogh, using the RDNA 2 architecture.
When the Steam Deck launched, it boasted an APU with four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2 iGPU with eight Compute Units—both of which date back to around 2020. Even with the OLED version rolled out last year, improvements in performance were noticeably absent.
In the tech world, AMD’s Strix Point APUs sporting the Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 architectures have been turning heads. Addressing queries about a new version of the Steam Deck, its designer, Lawrence Yang, emphasized their departure from frequent annual updates, stating, “We are not doing the yearly cadence.”
Valve seems to be aligning itself with gaming giants like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Even the latest PS5 Pro utilizes the older Zen 2 framework. Although the handheld market is seeing some evolution, with Intel entering the fray with Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) CPUs, these changes aren’t groundbreaking enough to warrant a new Steam Deck quite yet. Yang elaborated, “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.”
From a technical perspective, modern APUs have seen just minor gains in speed at power levels below 15W compared to what was available with the Ryzen 6000 Mobile (Rembrandt) series. While Intel’s Lunar Lake represents progress, Valve doesn’t deem it sufficient for spawning a new Steam Deck edition. The next iteration might bring substantial enhancements in both capability and battery life. Valve might also be exploring innovative options, such as developing an ARM64 version of Proton, which could open doors to integrating Arm cores with a GPU solution from Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA, reminiscent of the Nintendo Switch’s approach.
