Valve says 20‑50% gains won’t cut it for Steam Deck
Apparently key to success in the gaming world is to have as few releases as possible. We see this with the Nintendo Switch, Xbox/PlayStation systems, or even the GTA series, all of which wait years before major updates. That said, Valve is not interested in a minor upgrade for their Deck system – they are waiting for much better hardware first.
In an interview with IGN, Valve’s lead for Deck systems Pierre‑Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is not interested in a 20 % or even 50 % upgrade. They specifically said they need more than just performance with the same battery life for an actual upgrade:
“Obviously the Steam Deck’s not our focus today, but the same things we’ve said in the past where we’re really interested to work on what’s next for Steam Deck… the thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product. […]
We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.”
— Pierre-Loup Griffais, Valve
As we recall, AMD, who supplies the chip for the Steam Deck, mentioned that the focus now is not on frame‑rate improvements but on battery life. That’s where modern upscaling and frame‑generation technologies are heading. Although the RDNA2 architecture powering the Deck can do ray tracing, it has limited support for modern AI technologies, and performance with the unofficial FSR 4 release may explain why AMD is hesitant to launch it on former architectures. Perhaps this will change with a Redstone release that uses a different approach, but no one knows anything official at this point.
Source: AMD
When AMD announced the Ryzen Z2 series in January, we shared the slide (shared above) and assumed that the Steam Deck would get a Z2 chip, ut that was wrong. Pierre‑Loup quickly corrected our error, and we are beginning to understand why. The Z2 is only a minor upgrade over the Deck’s current specs, and as numerous tests show, RDNA2‑based graphics still hold up well even against much more powerful iGPUs powered by RDNA3 or RDNA3.5 architectures. It all comes down to optimizations.
A good guess might be that the Steam Deck 2 will use an RDNA5 architecture. Unfortunately, that would also mean it won’t arrive soon. AMD and Valve are not in a rush to adopt the latest architectures. Even Nintendo didn’t use Blackwell, or even Ada, for their Switch 2 system; they relied on Ampere from a few years ago, which still worked well, and the company already sold 10 million units .
Source: IGN
