The Steam Deck has truly changed the game, quite literally, by allowing players to tackle AAA titles from the comfort of their own beds with a handheld machine. Enthusiasts and gamers are buzzing with excitement over the possibility of a Steam Deck 2, especially given the tremendous leaps in APU technology over the past few years. Nevertheless, Valve has made it clear that we’re not likely to see a Steam Deck 2 hit the market until a “generational leap in compute” materializes, as discussed in an interview with Reviews.org.
AMD’s RDNA architecture has proven to be significantly superior to its older Vega models, especially in terms of performance and driver support. By just its second update with RDNA 2, Valve worked with AMD to create the Steam Deck’s custom chip, which goes by the codename Van Gogh.
The Steam Deck is equipped with an APU featuring four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2 iGPU, boasting eight Compute Units. These components have been around since at least 2020. Even when the new OLED version was released last year, there weren’t any noticeable performance boosts.
With AMD’s latest Strix Point APUs, built on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5, the question of a follow-up device naturally arises. When this was posed to Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang, he noted, “It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence.”
Valve seems to be aligning itself with the strategies of industry giants like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Even the PS5 Pro remains rooted in the older Zen 2 architecture. While there have been strides in the handheld gaming sector, including Intel’s entry with its Lunar Lake CPUs, the advancements haven’t been groundbreaking enough to warrant launching a Steam Deck 2 just 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, today’s APUs at sub-15W aren’t much faster than their predecessors like the Rembrandt series. Lunar Lake is a promising direction, but if even this doesn’t meet Valve’s standards, then we’re looking at a potentially significant jump when the Steam Deck 2 eventually arrives, enhancing both performance and battery life. Valve’s exploration of an ARM64 Proton version hints at potential innovations, such as integrating Arm cores with GPU solutions from leading players like Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA, akin to the Nintendo Switch approach.
