The Steam Deck adds something incredibly valuable that the PC market has never had: a consistent target spec for minimum hardware requirements. Upgrading every couple years would create confusion for which version for developers to focus on. They are treating it like a console, not a PC.
Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’
Submitted 1 year ago by meiko60@lemmy.sdf.org to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck-2-refresh-upgrade-cpu-2025
Comments
Stingray@reddthat.com 1 year ago
pastel_de_airfryer@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
We all know there won’t be a Deck 3. So I hope they take their time on making the second one perfect.
WereCat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What about Deck 2 Revision 1 & 2?
Pietson@kbin.social 1 year ago
Steam Deck: Alyx
cooopsspace@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Rofl
They just call it “4” just to fuck with people
Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Steam Deck ][
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Steam Deck: Alyx
And it’ll be a pre-built desktop, or something.
ndsvw@feddit.de 1 year ago
[deleted]cooopsspace@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Valve only releases two games in a series and stops before a third.
On everything, it’s basically a meme at this point about valve not being able to count to three.
pastel_de_airfryer@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
It’s in reference to Valve being unable to count to 3
Xianshi@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I’m glad they are not rushing a new one out until there is some genuine leap in the tech. I think we have become accustomed to pointless upgrades every year which offer nothing substantial other than lining some shareholders pockets.
In my case the longer they take the better 😊
Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
The console approach of 3-4 year refreshes
Jumpinship@lemmy.world 1 year ago
7840u is a substantially better apu though
Xianshi@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yes I get that but personally I have a huge backlog to get through and there are lots more games the current one can run that have to come down in price too so I’ll be busy for a long time before I start looking for a new one.
Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
That’s good. A Steam Deck 2 might make sense once there’s an APU with double the performance at the same 15W.
Current APU’s are faster per watt, but only at higher power consumption. This means either the battery life sucks, or the handheld is too heavy and expensive with a giant battery.
The current handhelds by other manufacturers are faster, but only a bit. 120Hz are nice, but I don’t even reach 60fps on most titles and it consumes too much power. Games might perform a bit better but everything is still also playable on the SD, so there’s no real point in releasing a second generation. All these devices fill the same niche.
What I expect is a refresh of the SD with an OLED display. Maybe even with VRR and HDR, now that SteamOS has support for it. Farther down the wish list are hall effect joysticks.
xep@kbin.social 1 year ago
I'd like similar things to you as well. The SD doesn't have to get any faster. On my wishlist:
- VRR
- better display
- lighter and thinner
- better airflow (but keep the new fan smell)
vividspecter@lemm.ee 1 year ago
High refresh rates and VRR go hand to hand, so you’d still want that if you want VRR. You just limit the framerate to 60fps or lower if you don’t want the hit to battery life.
Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
As an Australian, I’m not expecting a Steam Deck at all.
rx8geek@aussie.zone 1 year ago
If you can deal with the issues of grey import, it’s trivially easy to get one here now. I got a 64gb from Kogan, and since I’m rolling the dice with warranty - did a 1tb SSD upgrade myself.
Definitely happy with my purchase it’s an awesome machine
Lutz69@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Putting in your own 1TB SSD is so easy I wouldn’t even worry about the whole warranty thing. Just follow along with a YouTube video and you’re done in 10 minutes.
Vqhm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Kogan provides a year warranty tho… so it’s not exactly a grey import (like fly by night eBay seller)
I think you might have to cover shipping for repairs tho if you don’t have their extended warranty.
I think they have to provide that warranty by law tho
Pixelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
[deleted]maniajack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But what about that NEW BATTERY TECH that’s coming out soon…
Nested_Array@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They used the same definition of soon as this sentence: Fusion power will soon be available.
Dettweiler42@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s still fulfilling its role well. Meanwhile, the Index is getting pretty old compared to current-gen VR headsets. It’s still a fantastic headset, but it would be nice to have something smaller, lighted, and wireless.
Bigscreen’s Beyond headset should be looked at as something the next wave of VR headsets should strive for.
FreeBooteR69@kbin.social 1 year ago
I think we are getting close to the Deckard being announced, the successor to the Index. Hopefully they do hand controller refresh/redesign, the joystick potentiometer they used in the Index Controllers were dog shit.
vividspecter@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I think we are getting close to the Deckard being announced, the successor to the Index.
Hopefully it’s cheaper and more widely available than the Index. I’m waiting for it because I don’t want to deal with Windows anymore for anything, and VR is one of the last requirements.
Dettweiler42@lemmy.world 1 year ago
True. Thankfully, it’s a common part, so I was able to replace mine relatively easily and it’s held up well.
If it is a Deckard coming soon, I’ll definitely be working out for one.
GreenAlex@kbin.social 1 year ago
It makes total sense. Just a bit of a bummer when looking at the reality of devs being awful/not caring about optimising their games. The Deck is just barely hanging on with this year's big titles.
Thankfully, there's plenty of older and/or more lightweight options out there.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I’m not sure the Steamdeck was created with the latest AAA games in mind.
BG3 co-op slows my PS5 to a crawl. People gotta be chilling with their expectations of what a £350 handheld can do.
GreenAlex@kbin.social 1 year ago
To be fair, the Deck is underpriced for its power level. I unfortunately can't find the quote but if memory serves they were planning to achieve a 30fps target on the device for a few years, which obviously hasn't quite panned out. Given that this year has been notorious for badly optimized games, I would personally attribute the problems the device is having to that, rather than the Deck itself being too weak to keep up.
amenotef@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Many people are still playing with a PS4. And generally consoles last several years.
If we can move the optimisations more to the PC world that would be also nice to keep devices running in the longer term.
What I don’t see possible is a future steam deck running a native resolution like above 720p requiring much more GPU PWR.
Maybe they’ll add 1080p or higher resolution monitors and start using more the upscaling.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Mind if I ask something?
What is the origin of always wanting higher and higher definitions lately?
It comes to a point where it makes no objective difference between resolutions for the human eye.
And I’ve seen TVs advertised as being “sharper and brighter than real life”. The only thing the image made for me was getting my eyes sore after staring at the screen for a few seconds.
I’m still from the time when the graphics on the cover were better than the actual graphics and that is something I don’t miss but come on… when is enough enough?
tormeh@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Don’t play big titles on the Deck. That’s not what it’s good at. Play Fez or Tunic or something. There’s a near infinite list of great games that are not technically demanding.
AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Good. Two years is too short of a time for a hardware generation.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
good, I’m sick of companies being like “hey here’s the new version of insert product that worked in every category here, as such as are not supporting the old device anymore, but don’t worry the new version has sparkles on the menus!”
ThickQuiveringTip@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Too true
Fizz@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
Idc about steam deck 2 because I’ve already got a steam deck I’m happy with.
rmuk@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I’m not after a Steam Deck v2, but I’d love a v1.1 with Thunderbolt support. I’ll buy a Steam Deck the moment it will happily play with an eGPU without a Dremel getting involved.
theangryseal@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Holy shit that would be amazing.
I’d seriously regret buying mine if that came out.
That said, I play mine so much the plastic is getting smooth haha.
flamingarms@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Currently the ROG Ally is the only one of these with eGPU support, right? And it’s still only for their proprietary ones?
Jumpinship@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There’s so many. And GPD devices even have native pcie out via oculink
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 1 year ago
I wonder whether, when the faster Steam Deck 2 comes, it may have ditched the x86 architecture altogether and leapt to a high-performance ARM CPU, yielding more power per watt and generating less heat. If so, that would presumably require Proton to be supplemented with a Rosetta-style translation engine that can convert x86 machine code into ARM.
Currently, outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.
jherazob@beehaw.org 1 year ago
I’d say while it’s possible it’s unlikely, remember that they’re running PC games, all based on X86, the work needed to make Wine/Proton run all of that well on a different CPU set is significant, and would likely break compatibility in unexpected ways, effectively bringing all the recent wins moot and bringing Proton backwards. Definitely something that will likely happen, but more of a long-term goal (unless it’s already in progress and with advances, no idea, but we would all have heard of it already if it was a thing)
Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
With the timeframe this is likely to happen over, it might be RISC-V instead of ARM since that’s an open source hardware platform and ARM seems to be joining enshittification trends (starting with worse licensing terms)
serratur@lemmy.wtf 1 year ago
There allready is a transition layer that can be used so they wouldnt have to start from scratch
Tau@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
A few months ago I remember they hired a contractor for arm development, I think they were a member from the Asahi Linux project
ikidd@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That Asahi team have done some amazing stuff, especially on the graphics front. They’ve put out a fully conformant OpenGL driver for the M1+2, something even Apple themselves haven’t done for their own hardware.
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
with a Rosetta-style translation
Apple fans before their favorite binary translator came out: qemu-user? Eww… ELBRUS with lintel? Ewwwwww, you suck in past century!
Apple fans after their favorite binary translator came out: We have the Never Seen Before™ technology that was pionered by company we lick.
outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.
They exists for many years. There are HPC cores in Cortex-A, entire Cortex-X and super HPC Neoverse cores, but they are rarely seen outside of datacenters.
kib48@lemm.ee 1 year ago
there already is a project for x86 to ARM translation on Linux called box86, and there’s another one for x86_64 called box64 havent heard about them in a while but I remember seeing a video of someone playing doom 3 on a raspberry pi with it so it seems very promising
callouscomic@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The only thing I wish they had done is an OLED screen.
ilikekeyboards@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I heard they tried to buy some panels from Samsung but they wanted such a huge amount per product that it would’ve raised the steam decks price way beyond of most consumers product. You can make more money by selling a cheaper product to more people rather than a premium product to a select few.
stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
I’m not familiar with the topic but couldn’t they cut straight to the source and directly contact Corning? Or alternatively, one of those Chinese high end OLED knock offs? I’ve heard they’re basically less than 1 generation apart in terms of quality.
MiikCheque@lemmy.world 1 year ago
is lg still in this space? maybe Sony they make camera lens I think
dlove67@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Honestly this is a good thing, IMO. If we ever want devs to optimize for a given device, they need to know that it won’t be obsolete immediately. Hopefully seeing that Valve isn’t rushing to make a new device will give them confidence in that.
mustbe3to20signs@feddit.de 1 year ago
The only upgrade I expect for newer iterations of 1st gen SteamDeck is a more efficient APU providing the same performance to prolong battery runtime.
Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
Same. And larger battery. And larger resolution screen, even if it’s not driven at full resolution most of the time. I’d like to have the option especially for media and text.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Griffais credits “a targeted optimization effort in the Mesa radv Vulkan driver by our graphics driver team” to support unusual features like ExecuteIndirect, explaining that Valve learned how to optimize a similar GPU-driven rendering pipeline when it added support for Halo Infinite.)
All that said, Valve might totally still have a Steam Deck refresh in the works that doesn’t change the performance floor.
Screen and battery are the top pain points both Griffais and fellow designer Lawrence Yang want to address in a Steam Deck sequel, too, they told me in late 2022.
Or perhaps it just waits, and Valve’s mystery Galileo / Sephiroth turns out to be the long-awaited SteamVR standalone headset.
There’s also a theory that maybe Galileo is a Steam living room PC that can beam graphics to a headset, but Griffais threw some cold water on that idea last week.
The original article contains 501 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Nath@aussie.zone 1 year ago
I’d be happy to have the option to buy the first edition (from Valve and not a grey import with zero warranty) in Australia.
Kronlid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Cant you buy it on steam from Australia?
StorminNorman@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nope. Only on the grey market. To be fair, most grey market sellers if it do have a fairly robust refund set up cos Australian law dictates they must. But some of them will make you feel like you’re trying to get blood from a stone if something goes wrong…
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What is grey import?
Nath@aussie.zone 1 year ago
You buy what you hope is a genuine Steam Deck from someone who has brought it here from the USA for 🇦🇺$1,000.
Valve won’t help you if you have problems, because you are in Australia. Depending on who you bought it from Australian consumer protection laws might not apply.
AnonTwo@kbin.social 1 year ago
Another point is the steamOS is still fairly new and needs to be worked on a lot more, since it isn't even fully utilizing the steamdeck yet, let alone ready for a new one
hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My deck is about to reach it’s final form and I need a few years out of it. So far I’ve done
2TB ssd hall effect joysticks Transparent green shell front and back. played around with undervolting/ over clocking replaced screen with anti glare (only because I broke it)
I’m waiting on a beefier heatsink and I’d like to find some cool buttons.
The only other thing left to do would be try the 32GB RAM swap that some madlad did. I’m not really interested in the deck HD screen but could get behind a 800p or 1600p OLED panel.
imaBEES@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What do you think of the Hall effect joysticks? I was thinking of getting some, but been kind of turned off by reports of the square shaped output they have making rotating worse
hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They seem fine to me. Definitely a square profile if I run the test, but feel fine during gameplay to me. Probably the least worthwhile mod I’ve done though. The dbrand thumbstick grips are worth it.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Oh shit son…Deckard could be a standalone VR headset then
Molecular0079@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I am actually hoping more for a Steam Machine. A standalone VR headset will be dead in the water. It won’t have enough processing power to power any PCVR experiences adequately.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
We had steam machines
—they sucked, were under spec’d and overpriced
MJBrune@beehaw.org 1 year ago
It’s something VR related and that’s been confirmed for a while since the lighthouses that ship with vive have deckard in the devices list. Standalone maybe not.
spiderkle@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
they’ll most likey fix screen and battery issues fist along with stick drift.
kadu@lemmy.world 1 year ago
All I need from Valve is confirmation a Steam Deck 2 will exist - I don’t care how many years in the future that is. I just want to know if this is a “let’s quickstart the PC handheld market, here, take this as an example and go nuts” versus “this is now a hardware category we are invested in, we will make new units”
JohnWorks@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I can’t imagine they’d be able to use an off the shelf processor for the next one. The performance at lower wattages on the deck is so much better than current laptop processors or the Z1.
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Of fucking course not. They are taking a bath internally on every single one.
Mini_Moonpie@startrek.website 1 year ago
I just want to be able to use a password manager with Steam for online games.
keeb420@kbin.social 1 year ago
A faster one won't exist, fine. what about an oled deck?
Wahots@pawb.social 1 year ago
I wouldn’t hold your breath. So far, Valve has only released like, one generation of all of their hardware. But their hardware is pretty decent.
Spiracle@kbin.social 1 year ago
Screen and battery are the top pain points both Griffais and fellow designer Lawrence Yang want to address in a Steam Deck sequel, too, they told me in late 2022.
From the article.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
The next will be 1080p and I can’t see the battery life and cost being right for yeah a couple years.
Lightor@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I loved my steak deck, but I sold it and got a ROG Ally, it’s better in every way and makes me wonder why Valve is just letting other companies run away with their idea.
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The goddamn system is only a year and a half old, and is finally seeing a wider adoption. If they added a new SKU into the market, it would only confuse and piss off the people who already bought one. These stories about Steam Deck “refreshes” and “upgrades” are fucking stupid, and I hope the shithouses that put them out don’t get any review units when the real one finally does hit the market.
GreenMario@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s how the Chinese handhelds (Retroid and Anbernic, etc) do it they release a new model every few months. I guess they expected Valve to take that approach instead of a console generation approach.
Personally I’d hate it if they did that. Do one every 4-5 years and let the upgrade be significant.