Yesterday’s announcement of new living room and VR hardware from Valve obviously has many gamers eager for any news of a more powerful version of the nearly 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, however, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that portable gaming silicon still hasn’t advanced enough to justify brand-new benchmark hardware.
“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a meaningful performance upgrade [for a Steam Deck 2] “To make sense as a standalone product. We’re not interested in getting to the point where there’s 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little more delimited than that,” Griffis told IGN.
“So we’re working on silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now in that scenario, there’s no offering in SoC. [System on a Chip] “The scenario, we think this will really be the next generation performance Steam deck,” Griffais continued.
More power, but at what cost?
At first glance, Griffis’ comments may seem to contradict the progress we’ve seen in portable PC gaming handhelds in recent years. For example, the eight-core Zen 5-based AMD chip in the recently launched ROG Xbox Ally The new handheld can push decent-quality 1080p graphics at reasonable frame rates for many recent games that older Steam decks struggle to run at all.
However, keep in mind that Griffiths said Valve is focused on making these types of performance improvements “at the same battery life.” ROG Xbox Ally