Yesterday's announcement new living room And VR equipment from Valve has apparently left many gamers hungry for any news about a more powerful version of the Steam Deck that was released almost 4 years ago. IN new IGN interviewHowever, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffet says portable gaming processors are still not mature enough to justify entirely new reference hardware.
“We are confident that this is a fairly decent increase in productivity. [for a Steam Deck 2] make sense as a standalone product,” Griffeis told IGN. “We're not interested in getting to the point where performance is 20, 30 or even 50 percent better for the same battery life. We need something clearer than that.”
“So we're working on silicon improvements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of the Steam Deck will be, but right now there are no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC. [System on a Chip] Landscape, which we think will truly be the next generation Steam Deck,” Griffeis continued.
More power, but at what cost?
At first glance, Griffe's comments may seem to contradict the advances we've seen in portable gaming PCs in recent years. Octa-core AMD chip based on Zen 5. newly released ROG Xbox Ally Xfor example, significantly more powerful than the quad-core Zen 2 chip on the Steam Deck. The new laptop can render decent quality 1080p graphics at reasonable frame rates for many of the latest games that the old Steam Deck struggles to run at all.
Keep in mind, however, that Valve is aiming for these kinds of performance improvements “with the same battery life,” according to Griffeis. The ROG Xbox Ally X's battery is 50 percent larger than the original Steam Deck, and it still drains the battery completely in about two hours when running the most demanding games on Turbo mode.
