Steam Deck

The Steam Deck adds something incredibly valuable that the PC market has never had: a consistent target spec for minimum hardware requirements. Upgrading every couple years would create confusion for which version for developers to focus on. They are treating it like a console, not a PC.

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 😊

We all know there won't be a Deck 3. So I hope they take their time on making the second one perfect.

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.

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.

As an Australian, I’m not expecting a Steam Deck at all.

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.

Good. Two years is too short of a time for a hardware generation.

Idc about steam deck 2 because I've already got a steam deck I'm happy with.

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.

The only thing I wish they had done is an OLED screen.

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.

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.

Its fast enough just give me some usb4 so I can use an egpu.

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.

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

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.

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Oh shit son…Deckard could be a standalone VR headset then

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 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.