The Steam Deck has certainly changed the game, offering a new way to experience top-tier titles right from the comfort of your bed with a handheld device. It’s no surprise that the gaming community is eagerly on the lookout for news about a potential Steam Deck 2, especially considering the significant advancements in APU technology over the past few years. However, Valve has made it clear in a conversation with Reviews.org that we shouldn’t hold our breath for new developments just yet. They mentioned that a “generational leap in compute” is necessary before they consider launching a sequel to the Steam Deck.
Initially, AMD’s RDNA architecture was miles ahead of its Vega predecessors concerning both performance and driver support. Valve teamed up with AMD to develop a custom chip for the Steam Deck, known as Van Gogh, leveraging RDNA 2 technology. The original Steam Deck included an APU with four Zen 2 cores and an iGPU from RDNA 2 featuring eight Compute Units, both based on designs dating back to around 2020. Despite an OLED screen refresh last year, actual performance improvements were noticeably absent.
Recent developments in AMD’s lineup, like the Strix Point APUs (Ryzen AI 300) incorporating Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5, sparked curiosity about a new Steam Deck version. But when asked, Steam Deck developer Lawrence Yang reiterated, “It’s important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence.”
Valve seems to be taking a page from the playbooks of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Even the latest PS5 Pro sticks with the older Zen 2 technology. While there have been advances in handhelds, including Intel jumping into the fray with its Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) CPUs, none have tipped the scale enough to warrant a Steam Deck 2 release. Yang shared, “So 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, APUs today are not significantly faster at power levels below 15W compared to what was available with the Rembrandt series (Ryzen 6000 Mobile). While Lunar Lake does show progress in its architectural choices, even this hasn’t impressed Valve enough to move forward with a new model. A potential Steam Deck 2 would likely boast a significant boost in both performance and battery efficiency. Additionally, Valve is exploring an ARM64 version of Proton, which could open doors to incorporating Arm cores alongside GPUs from Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA—mirroring the innovative approach of the Nintendo Switch.
