Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’
Deck Pro might be years away.
The goddamn system is only a year and a half old, and is finally seeing a wider adoption. If they added a new SKU into the market, it would only confuse and piss off the people who already bought one. These stories about Steam Deck "refreshes" and "upgrades" are fucking stupid, and I hope the shithouses that put them out don't get any review units when the real one finally does hit the market.
We all know there won't be a Deck 3. So I hope they take their time on making the second one perfect.
What about Deck 2 Revision 1 & 2?
Steam Deck: Alyx
Rofl
They just call it "4" just to fuck with people
Steam Deck ][
2048: Steam Deck
Steam Deck: Alyx
And it'll be a pre-built desktop, or something.
I don't have a steamdeck, so I'm allowed to ask the question: Why not?
It's in reference to Valve being unable to count to 3
Valve only releases two games in a series and stops before a third.
On everything, it's basically a meme at this point about valve not being able to count to three.
I'm glad they are not rushing a new one out until there is some genuine leap in the tech. I think we have become accustomed to pointless upgrades every year which offer nothing substantial other than lining some shareholders pockets.
In my case the longer they take the better 😊
The console approach of 3-4 year refreshes
7840u is a substantially better apu though
Yes I get that but personally I have a huge backlog to get through and there are lots more games the current one can run that have to come down in price too so I'll be busy for a long time before I start looking for a new one.
I think this is healthy. People (including myself) are easily sucked into consumerism instead of sustainability.
Better to have a good device that is highly repairable, upgradeable, and modable. That way you can make small improvements and add some high quality accessories without just trying to force everybody to buy the newest shiny device every 18-24 months.
Unless you're only playing the latest AAA games, the Deck will perform great for many years to come.
I got sucked down the hype/consumerism hole for many years after college, and I blew so much money on buying every new PC part and accessory even though I didn't need any of them.
Apple has a new event and a new phone and a new watch EVERY YEAR. aren't we obligated to buy all this shit every year?
That's good. A Steam Deck 2 might make sense once there's an APU with double the performance at the same 15W.
Current APU's are faster per watt, but only at higher power consumption. This means either the battery life sucks, or the handheld is too heavy and expensive with a giant battery.
The current handhelds by other manufacturers are faster, but only a bit. 120Hz are nice, but I don't even reach 60fps on most titles and it consumes too much power. Games might perform a bit better but everything is still also playable on the SD, so there's no real point in releasing a second generation. All these devices fill the same niche.
What I expect is a refresh of the SD with an OLED display. Maybe even with VRR and HDR, now that SteamOS has support for it. Farther down the wish list are hall effect joysticks.
I'd like similar things to you as well, which is for the the Deck to get more efficient per watt. On my wishlist:
High refresh rates and VRR go hand to hand, so you'd still want that if you want VRR. You just limit the framerate to 60fps or lower if you don't want the hit to battery life.
As an Australian, I’m not expecting a Steam Deck at all.
If you can deal with the issues of grey import, it's trivially easy to get one here now. I got a 64gb from Kogan, and since I'm rolling the dice with warranty - did a 1tb SSD upgrade myself.
Definitely happy with my purchase it's an awesome machine
Dude, just buy one.. pay the extra money and get one, I did and I cant put it down.. kogan is where I got mine
It's still fulfilling its role well. Meanwhile, the Index is getting pretty old compared to current-gen VR headsets. It's still a fantastic headset, but it would be nice to have something smaller, lighter, and wireless.
Bigscreen's Beyond headset should be looked at as something the next wave of VR headsets should strive for.
I think we are getting close to the Deckard being announced, the successor to the Index. Hopefully they do hand controller refresh/redesign, the joystick potentiometer they used in the Index Controllers were dog shit.
I think we are getting close to the Deckard being announced, the successor to the Index.
Hopefully it's cheaper and more widely available than the Index. I'm waiting for it because I don't want to deal with Windows anymore for anything, and VR is one of the last requirements.
True. Thankfully, it's a common part, so I was able to replace mine relatively easily and it's held up well.
If it is a Deckard coming soon, I'll definitely be working out for one.
It makes total sense. Just a bit of a bummer when looking at the reality of devs being awful/not caring about optimising their games. The Deck is just barely hanging on with this year's big titles.
Thankfully, there's plenty of older and/or more lightweight options out there.
I'm not sure the Steamdeck was created with the latest AAA games in mind.
BG3 co-op slows my PS5 to a crawl. People gotta be chilling with their expectations of what a £350 handheld can do.
To be fair, the Deck is underpriced for its power level. I unfortunately can't find the quote but if memory serves they were planning to achieve a 30fps target on the device for a few years, which obviously hasn't quite panned out. Given that this year has been notorious for badly optimized games, I would personally attribute the problems the device is having to that, rather than the Deck itself being too weak to keep up.
Many people are still playing with a PS4. And generally consoles last several years.
If we can move the optimisations more to the PC world that would be also nice to keep devices running in the longer term.
What I don't think is going to happen is a future steam deck running a native resolution at 1080p requiring much more GPU PWR.
Maybe they'll add 1080p or higher resolution screen and start using more the upscaling.
But running a future GPU bound game natively at 1080p will make any medium term upgrade more like a downgrade.
Mind if I ask something?
What is the origin of always wanting higher and higher definitions lately?
It comes to a point where it makes no objective difference between resolutions for the human eye.
And I've seen TVs advertised as being "sharper and brighter than real life". The only thing the image made for me was getting my eyes sore after staring at the screen for a few seconds.
I'm still from the time when the graphics on the cover were better than the actual graphics and that is something I don't miss but come on... when is enough enough?
Don't play big titles on the Deck. That's not what it's good at. Play Fez or Tunic or something. There's a near infinite list of great games that are not technically demanding.
Good. Two years is too short of a time for a hardware generation.
I agree, and tbh everything I throw at my deck, it just handles it, a play things like oxygen not included and modded minecraft, I love my deck
good, I'm sick of companies being like "hey here's the new version of insert product that worked in every category here, as such as are not supporting the old device anymore, but don't worry the new version has sparkles on the menus!"
Too true
Idc about steam deck 2 because I've already got a steam deck I'm happy with.
I'm not after a Steam Deck v2, but I'd love a v1.1 with Thunderbolt support. I'll buy a Steam Deck the moment it will happily play with an eGPU without a Dremel getting involved.
Holy shit that would be amazing.
I’d seriously regret buying mine if that came out.
That said, I play mine so much the plastic is getting smooth haha.
Currently the ROG Ally is the only one of these with eGPU support, right? And it's still only for their proprietary ones?
There's so many. And GPD devices even have native pcie out via oculink
The only thing I wish they had done is an OLED screen.
I heard they tried to buy some panels from Samsung but they wanted such a huge amount per product that it would've raised the steam decks price way beyond of most consumers product. You can make more money by selling a cheaper product to more people rather than a premium product to a select few.
I'm not familiar with the topic but couldn't they cut straight to the source and directly contact Corning? Or alternatively, one of those Chinese high end OLED knock offs? I've heard they're basically less than 1 generation apart in terms of quality.
edit: alternatively, I assume all cables/connectors are standard. What's preventing Jim next door from starting a group buy to manufacture replacement OLED screens/upgrade kits?
is lg still in this space? maybe Sony they make camera lens I think
I wonder whether, when the faster Steam Deck 2 comes, it may have ditched the x86 architecture altogether and leapt to a high-performance ARM CPU, yielding more power per watt and generating less heat. If so, that would presumably require Proton to be supplemented with a Rosetta-style translation engine that can convert x86 machine code into ARM.
Currently, outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.
I'd say while it's possible it's unlikely, remember that they're running PC games, all based on X86, the work needed to make Wine/Proton run all of that well on a different CPU set is significant, and would likely break compatibility in unexpected ways, effectively bringing all the recent wins moot and bringing Proton backwards. Definitely something that will likely happen, but more of a long-term goal (unless it's already in progress and with advances, no idea, but we would all have heard of it already if it was a thing)
With the timeframe this is likely to happen over, it might be RISC-V instead of ARM since that's an open source hardware platform and ARM seems to be joining enshittification trends (starting with worse licensing terms)
There allready is a transition layer that can be used so they wouldnt have to start from scratch. Box86/64
A few months ago I remember they hired a contractor for arm development, I think they were a member from the Asahi Linux project
That Asahi team have done some amazing stuff, especially on the graphics front. They've put out a fully conformant OpenGL driver for the M1+2, something even Apple themselves haven't done for their own hardware.
there already is a project for x86 to ARM translation on Linux called box86, and there's another one for x86_64 called box64 havent heard about them in a while but I remember seeing a video of someone playing doom 3 on a raspberry pi with it so it seems very promising
with a Rosetta-style translation
Apple fans before their favorite binary translator came out: qemur? Eww.. ELBRUS with lintel? Ewwwwww, you suck in past century!
Apple fans after their favorite binary translator came out: We have the Never Seen Before™ technology that was pionered by company we mindlessly praise.
outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.
They exists for many years. There are HPC cores in Cortex-A, entire Cortex-X and super HPC Neoverse cores, but they are rarely seen outside of datacenters.
Honestly this is a good thing, IMO. If we ever want devs to optimize for a given device, they need to know that it won't be obsolete immediately. Hopefully seeing that Valve isn't rushing to make a new device will give them confidence in that.
The only upgrade I expect for newer iterations of 1st gen SteamDeck is a more efficient APU providing the same performance to prolong battery runtime.
Same. And larger battery. And larger resolution screen, even if it's not driven at full resolution most of the time. I'd like to have the option especially for media and text.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge and CNBC that it could be late 2025 or beyond before it raises that bar — because it wants to see a leap in performance without a significant hit to battery life.
Griffais credits “a targeted optimization effort in the Mesa radv Vulkan driver by our graphics driver team” to support unusual features like ExecuteIndirect, explaining that Valve learned how to optimize a similar GPU-driven rendering pipeline when it added support for Halo Infinite.)
All that said, Valve might totally still have a Steam Deck refresh in the works that doesn’t change the performance floor.
Screen and battery are the top pain points both Griffais and fellow designer Lawrence Yang want to address in a Steam Deck sequel, too, they told me in late 2022.
Or perhaps it just waits, and Valve’s mystery Galileo / Sephiroth turns out to be the long-awaited SteamVR standalone headset.
There’s also a theory that maybe Galileo is a Steam living room PC that can beam graphics to a headset, but Griffais threw some cold water on that idea last week.
The original article contains 501 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Another point is the steamOS is still fairly new and needs to be worked on a lot more, since it isn't even fully utilizing the steamdeck yet, let alone ready for a new one
I'd be happy to have the option to buy the first edition (from Valve and not a grey import with zero warranty) in Australia.
Cant you buy it on steam from Australia?
Nope. Only on the grey market. To be fair, most grey market sellers if it do have a fairly robust refund set up cos Australian law dictates they must. But some of them will make you feel like you're trying to get blood from a stone if something goes wrong...
What is grey import?
You buy what you hope is a genuine Steam Deck from someone who has brought it here from the USA for 🇦🇺$1,000.
Valve won't help you if you have problems, because you are in Australia. Depending on who you bought it from Australian consumer protection laws might not apply.
Its fast enough just give me some usb4 so I can use an egpu.
My deck is about to reach it's final form and I need a few years out of it. So far I've done
2TB ssd hall effect joysticks Transparent green shell front and back. played around with undervolting/ over clocking replaced screen with anti glare (only because I broke it)
I'm waiting on a beefier heatsink and I'd like to find some cool buttons.
The only other thing left to do would be try the 32GB RAM swap that some madlad did. I'm not really interested in the deck HD screen but could get behind a 800p or 1600p OLED panel.
What do you think of the Hall effect joysticks? I was thinking of getting some, but been kind of turned off by reports of the square shaped output they have making rotating worse
They seem fine to me. Definitely a square profile if I run the test, but feel fine during gameplay to me. Probably the least worthwhile mod I've done though. The dbrand thumbstick grips are worth it.
Oh shit son…Deckard could be a standalone VR headset then
It's something VR related and that's been confirmed for a while since the lighthouses that ship with vive have deckard in the devices list. Standalone maybe not.
@MJBrune @DoucheBagMcSwag Standalone? The cool thing to do is build an ecosystem now. Thank you, apple :/. So, you can’t just have one item, you got to get the accessories and other items. Is this the future of Linux?
I’m so happy to hear this. I’m getting a steam deck next week and have been wired that a faster version would be right around the corner.
The deck is amazing you're gonna love it
Yeah, I’ve been salivating over it for months. But I’m such a cautious spender. I’m not replacing another joycon, and I’m so happy it’s a repairable machine. I’ll upgrade the ssd down the line.
I’m honestly just so psyched.
All I need from Valve is confirmation a Steam Deck 2 will exist - I don't care how many years in the future that is. I just want to know if this is a "let's quickstart the PC handheld market, here, take this as an example and go nuts" versus "this is now a hardware category we are invested in, we will make new units"
they'll most likey fix screen and battery issues first along with stick drift.
I can't imagine they'd be able to use an off the shelf processor for the next one. The performance at lower wattages on the deck is so much better than current laptop processors or the Z1.
A faster one won't exist, fine. what about an oled deck?
I wouldn't hold your breath. So far, Valve has only released like, one generation of all of their hardware. But their hardware is pretty decent.
Screen and battery are the top pain points both Griffais and fellow designer Lawrence Yang want to address in a Steam Deck sequel, too, they told me in late 2022.
From the article.
The next one will be 1080p and I can't see the battery life and cost being right for yeah a couple years.
I just want to be able to use a password manager with Steam for online games.
This is good news for my wallet I guess, although it makes me wonder what's up with that "Sephiroth" APU that showed up in the Linux Kernel. I'm so happy with my current Steam Deck that I don't really need another iteration on it right away anyway.
Of fucking course not. They are taking a bath internally on every single one.
I loved my steak deck, but I sold it and got a ROG Ally, it's better in every way and makes me wonder why Valve is just letting other companies run away with their idea.
What do you mean by Valve's idea? Gaming oriented ultra mobile PCs existed before the deck. Valve just brought us an affordable one. (That runs Linux. Plus all the resources they put into proton.)
Edit: You can go back to at least 2010 with the Pandora.
Edit 2: I never heard of the Ocosmos OCS1 before, but it also dates to 2010 (announced).
https://www.anandtech.com/show/3932/ocosmos-ocs1-oak-trail-gaming-tablet-impressions
Edit 3: Can't find anything suggesting the OCS1 actually released.
Sure, it always existed, but I think it's obvious that the Switch and Steam Deck, more so the Switch, took off with the idea in modern gaming.
Valve has said, with pretty much every hardware initiative they've ever had, that their goal was to create a product line that other people will start competing with. They want to push the handheld form factor PC because they know it opens up a new group of gamers to their platform. They don't care who is making the hardware.
I have no complaints. It's nearly perfect device to me.
