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

Thick Thighs Save Lives

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
Valve has been clear it wants to build a Steam Deck 2 — and equally clear that a faster handheld wouldn't arrive soon. Now, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge and CNBC that it could be late 2025 or beyond before it raises that bar — because it wants to see a leap in performance without a significant hit to battery life.

Here's the whole quote:
It's important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don't want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don't anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we're still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there.
Click to expand...

More at:
www.theverge.com

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

Deck Pro might be years away.
www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
 
RoboFu

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Got to balance cost. There’s not much profit at launch as a year after. Can’t always be taking that hit.
 
C

crackajack

Member
Seems a bit weird for a PC like architecture. Unless AMD can't promise compatibility, a gradual update of the crucial parts, aligned with their new gen releases, especially to improve battery live, shouldn't be impossible and are much more needed than the power race on mobile where a ton of games hardly need the latest tech whereas any bit of more perf/W on this is very much needed? AMD anyway should get their act together and make APUs with a proper GPU part and not those good CPUs with underpowered GPUs like they do outside of the two consoles and the steamdeck. Make a proper entry level gamer tier as the standard above the current APUs and force intel as well to step up their iGPU game even more. Office PCs don't need it, but even the casualst of casual gamers could need a more balanced CPU-GPU combo, especially with the current non existant low end GPU releases.
 
Sorcerer

Sorcerer

Member
Not goodwill to slightly spec bump what is essentially a console in concept (pc trying to capture a console audience).
Valve has no competition, Lenovo, Asus, print money for Valve. Asus, and Lenovo, will most likely push updates out yearly because the money ends at the point of sale. Either that or they will drop out of the space altogether.
 
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rodrigolfp

rodrigolfp

Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
Dream-Knife said:
Stop viewing the deck as a PC and view it as a console.
Click to expand...
z50xp-1619719725-16226-list_items-no.jpg
 
Interfectum

Interfectum

Member
Valve being smart here. Imagine the hype for when they release the Deck 2 in 2026 vs diluting the brand with yearly updates.

They don't need to keep up with other PC handhelds because they all end up connecting to Steam anyway.
 
D

DeltaPolarBear

Member
crackajack said:
Seems a bit weird for a PC like architecture.
Click to expand...
Not at all. You can have more power but it would kill the battery. Have you ever owned a gaming Laptop? Trying to run it on batteries while using peak performance would drain it like mad. PC advances did NOT include economical use of power. Indeed both PCs and Consoles use more and more power draw every generation. But for as long as you plug it into the wall socket, you didn't have to care.

But handhelds do have to care. And Gameboy vs Gamegear taught us that battery life is more important than processing power for handhelds.
 
mrcroket

mrcroket

Member
crackajack said:
Seems a bit weird for a PC like architecture. Unless AMD can't promise compatibility, a gradual update of the crucial parts, aligned with their new gen releases, especially to improve battery live, shouldn't be impossible and are much more needed than the power race on mobile where a ton of games hardly need the latest tech whereas any bit of more perf/W on this is very much needed? AMD anyway should get their act together and make APUs with a proper GPU part and not those good CPUs with underpowered GPUs like they do outside of the two consoles and the steamdeck. Make a proper entry level gamer tier as the standard above the current APUs and force intel as well to step up their iGPU game even more. Office PCs don't need it, but even the casualst of casual gamers could need a more balanced CPU-GPU combo, especially with the current non existant low end GPU releases.
Click to expand...
No, because this will make "older" models obsolete pretty fast. The idea of have a steamdeck with the same specs during some years (said by valve) is to force developers to make a "steam deck graphic preset" like cyberpunk and others games do. If you want a more powerful handheld there are many other brands that will make it,
 
Tams

Tams

Member
RoboFu said:
Got to balance cost. There’s not much profit at launch as a year after. Can’t always be taking that hit.
Click to expand...

At the prices they're selling them, many sales are probably at a loss.

I understand why, but a company that prints money like them could easily profitably have yearly upgrades.

But it's good for the other handheld gaming PC OEMs that Valve aren't bothering to compete with them.
 
Sethbacca

Sethbacca

Member
They really need a way to modularize these mini pcs and handhelds so that you can have a market similar to what PC enthusiasts are used to. Swap out a gpu module here, a cpu there.
 
Klosshufvud

Klosshufvud

Member
The Van Gogh chip is sort of underpowered for today's standards. It is decisively outperformed by the 7840U handhelds at 15W. Even more so at 20W. Steam Deck's battery is simply too small for 15W gameplay and there exists PC 7840U handhelds with longer battery life even at 20W.

Kinda bummer statement really. The ultra low weight SoC output has taken tremendous steps lately.
 
Cyberpunkd

Cyberpunkd

Gold Member
Klosshufvud said:
The Van Gogh chip is sort of underpowered for today's standards. It is decisively outperformed by the 7840U handhelds at 15W. Even more so at 20W. Steam Deck's battery is simply too small for 15W gameplay and there exists PC 7840U handhelds with longer battery life even at 20W.

Kinda bummer statement really. The ultra low weight SoC output has taken tremendous steps lately.
Click to expand...
And will take more steps. It never stops. Valve is doing the right thing, it’s Nintendo Switch playing PC games.
 
Kdad

Kdad

Member
I'll be moving to linux in 2025 when MS drops Win 10 support...would love to move to linux gaming at that time too but not with 5 year old hardware.
 
Fbh

Fbh

Member
They are going to have to adapt though when all the rumors of Switch 2 come true and it's rendering Avatar The Way of Water in real time at 4K 120fps while using basically no power as it enjoys from infinite battery life as long as the small calculator tier solar cell gets 30 seconds of direct light per day
 
AndrewRyan

AndrewRyan

Member
When Gabe lovingly bestows more powerful Decks they'll need to update what Verified on Steam Deck means. Hopefully they're named by release year or sequentially. I.e. name them like Sony does, not like Microsoft & Nintendo.
 
GHG

GHG

Member
twilo99 said:
Let's hope we don't find out but I disagree.. Phil can do hardware better than Valve
Click to expand...

Honestly your misplaced worship of this guy is troubling.

Cut the crap, this is a guy who thought they had a 30% advantage over the PS5.

Valves engineers have proven to be far more capable than him or any team he's ever put together.
 
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twilo99

twilo99

Gold Member
Cyberpunkd said:
How is XSX and XSS working out for them? Because the first one loses to less powerful PS5 due to clock speeds + SSD, the second is holding developers back due to low RAM. Meanwhile SteamOS plays Windows games better than Window-based handhelds.
Click to expand...

The packaging, cooling, and power draw of both Phil machines is better than the PS5 and overall they are very well engineered consoles... have you noticed that there was no need to "revise" the xbox hardware unlick the Sony made console?
 
rodrigolfp

rodrigolfp

Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
March Climber said:
It doesn't follow the rules of consoles from a software standpoint, but it follows the rules of consoles from a hardware standpoint.

We call this a hyrid console, and they have technically existed before.
Click to expand...
We call this a handheld PC.
DeepEnigma said:
Do you hook up your KBM to it too? We know how much you adore that pad life.
Click to expand...
Not yet so far as I don’t play any shooter, RTS, or "WoW" in it.
 
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