Don’t expect a more powerful Steam Deck 2 anytime soon

Valve is very clear: there will not be a more powerful Steam Deck in the coming years. If you hesitated before giving in, this might reassure you.

Unveiled at the end of 2021, Valve’s Steam Deck is slowly approaching its two-year mark. Being based on the architecture of a PC, the question therefore arises of a technical upgrade for what takes the appearance of a portable console. The Steam Deck uses an AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 chip, but since then we have already had the right to Zen 4 for the processors and RDNA 3 for the graphics cards.

Asked about these subjects, Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve very honestly answered questions from The Verge And CNBC.

No change before 2025

Above all, Valve wants to avoid creating complexity with the arrival of a new Steam Deck which would offer a different level of performance.

It’s important to us that the Deck provides a fixed performance target for developers and that the message to customers is simple: every Deck can play the same games. As such, we do not take changing performance level lightly and only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be achieved. We also don’t want increased performance to come at the expense of power efficiency and battery life. I don’t think such a leap will be possible in the next two years, but we continue to closely monitor innovations in architectures and manufacturing processes to see how things evolve in this area.

As it stands and barring any surprises, it excludes the technical upgrade of the Steam Deck over the next two years, therefore before 2025. This leaves more time for AMD to create a significant performance gap for equal consumption. If we imagine 2025 for the release of the next Steam Deck, Valve would place itself one year after the launch of the new Nintendo Switch.

Please note, we are focusing here on the power level of the Steam Deck, but nothing stops Valve from offering other changes with a new model. We are thinking, for example, of the arrival of an Oled screen on the Steam Deck. Microsoft is also preparing an Xbox Series X with a new design, without changing the level of performance.