Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’

2 months ago

Valve has been clear it wants to build a Steam Deck 2 — and equally clear that a faster handheld wouldn’t get soon. Now, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge and CNBC that it could beryllium precocious 2025 aliases beyond earlier it raises that barroom — because it wants to spot a leap successful capacity without a important deed to artillery life.

“I don’t expect specified a leap to beryllium imaginable successful nan adjacent mates of years,” he told maine via email.

Here’s nan full quote:

It’s important to america that nan Deck offers a fixed capacity target for developers, and that nan connection to customers is simple, wherever each Deck tin play nan aforesaid games. As such, changing nan capacity level is not thing we are taking lightly, and we only want to do truthful erstwhile location is simply a important enough increase to beryllium had. We besides don’t want much capacity to travel astatine a important costs to powerfulness ratio and artillery life. I don’t expect specified a leap to beryllium imaginable successful nan adjacent mates of years, but we’re still intimately monitoring innovations successful architectures and fabrication processes to spot wherever things are going there.

Earlier today, he said to CNBC connected nan aforesaid topic, saying “We’re looking astatine this capacity target that we person arsenic a unchangeable target for a mates years.” Since nan Steam Deck was released successful February 2022, I assumed he was astir apt talking astir 2024.

But “the adjacent mates of years” is simply a longer timeframe than I thought — and while nan Steam Deck tin still technically play nan latest PC games, it’s getting harder pinch nan latest activity of demanding / poorly optimized games for illustration The Last of Us Part I, Redfall and Starfield.

(I tin corroborate Starfield is now playable connected Deck, successful a “I’m consenting to tolerate unspeakable graphics to beforehand this quest” way, as of nan Steam Deck OS 3.5 Preview. Griffais credits “a targeted optimization effort successful nan Mesa radv Vulkan driver by our graphics driver team” to support different features for illustration ExecuteIndirect, explaining that Valve learned really to optimize a akin GPU-driven rendering pipeline erstwhile it added support for Halo Infinite.)

All that said, Valve mightiness wholly still person a Steam Deck refresh successful nan useful that doesn’t change nan capacity floor. There’s a rich | history of console manufacturers releasing smaller, lighter, and much powerfulness businesslike versions of nan aforesaid hardware, and Nintendo has refreshed nan Switch twice: once to amended nan battery and once to amended nan screen.

Screen and artillery are nan apical symptom points some Griffais and chap designer Lawrence nan want to reside successful a Steam Deck sequel, too, they told maine in precocious 2022.

And a caller surface could unlock much perceived capacity moreover if there’s nary caller spot to heighten nan framerate. The Asus ROG Ally showed america that — playing Starfield connected nan Ally and an Ayaneo Geek 1S, which some athletics very akin AMD chips, nan crippled feels smoother connected Asus mostly because its adaptable refresh complaint surface smooths retired nan dips. Valve could besides raise nan ceiling alternatively than nan floor, if it had a plugged-in turbo mode for illustration some those handhelds.

Perhaps Valve conscionable gets AMD to shrink and optimize nan aforesaid spot to usage little juice? Perhaps it finds a amended screen? Perhaps conscionable a larger battery? Or possibly it conscionable waits, and Valve’s enigma Galileo / Sephiroth turns retired to beryllium nan long-awaited SteamVR standalone headset.

There’s besides a mentation that maybe Galileo is simply a Steam surviving room PC that tin beam graphics to a headset, but Griffais threw immoderate acold h2o connected that idea past week.