The release of the Steam Deck marked a pivotal shift in the gaming landscape, allowing players to immerse themselves in top-tier games from the comfort of their couch or bed using a portable device. It’s no surprise that both gamers and tech enthusiasts are keenly looking forward to the possibility of a Steam Deck 2, especially since the APU industry has come leaps and bounds over the last five years. However, according to an interview with Reviews.org, Valve has emphasized that we shouldn’t expect a Steam Deck 2 anytime soon unless there’s a significant leap in computing power.
The partnership between Valve and AMD brought us an impressive piece of hardware with the first Steam Deck, driven by AMD’s RDNA architecture. The jump from the Vega lineup to RDNA was substantial, showcasing far better performance and driver support. With the development of RDNA 2, Valve worked hand-in-hand with AMD to create a custom chip for the Steam Deck, known as Van Gogh.
The original Steam Deck’s APU is powered by four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2 integrated GPU with eight compute units. These architectures have been around since at least 2020, and even with last year’s OLED update, performance enhancements were notably absent.
Looking at AMD’s recent Strix Point APUs, built on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5, the Steam Deck’s designer, Lawrence Yang, noted that Valve is not pursuing the development of new iterations on a yearly basis. "It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence,” Yang stated.
Valve appears to be aligning its strategy with those of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Even the latest PS5 Pro still uses the older Zen 2 architecture. Although there’s been progress in handheld technology, with Intel entering the fray with its Lunar Lake CPUs, Valve doesn’t see the advancements as sufficient for a new Steam Deck at this time. "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," Yang elaborated.
Technically speaking, today’s APUs aren’t significantly faster at sub-15W levels compared to the Rembrandt (Ryzen 6000 Mobile) series. Although Lunar Lake has made headway with some of its design decisions, if Valve remains unconvinced, it’s likely that the next Steam Deck will aim for a major boost in both performance and battery efficiency. Additionally, Valve is exploring an ARM64 version of Proton, leaving room for potential collaboration with Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA on a GPU, and taking a page from the Nintendo Switch’s playbook by possibly incorporating Arm cores.
