Valve isn’t looking to improve the performance of the next iteration of Steam Deck, the portable console designer said. The BargeInstead, the company will try to improve the battery life and display quality of the device for now.
Steam Deck Designer Pierre-Loup Griffais said:
Many new games are custom designed Steam Deck with RDNA 2 based GPU with 4 Zen 2 cores with 2.40-3.50 GHz SMT and 512 stream processors running at 1.0-1.60 GHz ‘s Aerith system-on-chip doesn’t really work smoothly. As a result, demanding gamers (who tend to buy more games) will prefer Steam decks with higher performing SoCs to enjoy the latest titles on the go. , Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais are looking forward to improving battery life and display in the next iteration of Steam Deck.
They tend to be significantly more expensive than the Steam Deck, but there are competing handhelds that might find a larger audience of demanding gamers. Core, Radeon 680M iGPU with RDNA 2, 768 SP) and offers higher performance at the expense of battery life.
“To understand the fact that all Steam Decks are now capable of playing the same game and what level of performance users expect while playing, and to understand what developers should be targeting. The fact that we have one target…there’s a lot of value in having that one specification,” said Griffais.
In fact, there are many reasons why it makes sense for Valve to maintain the same level of performance in the next iteration of Steam Decks. Otherwise, you’ll need to run two separate Steam Deck Compatibility Programs for the two consoles with different specs. Second, the game developer has to target two hardware configurations, which means longer time-to-market and higher costs. Third, some owners of the first generation Steam Decks will feel left out when the second generation is released. Finally, reducing Steam Deck costs and making hardware more profitable makes more economic sense than improving performance and not making money off the hardware. And as long as Steam Deck sales are strong, there’s little reason for the company to upgrade significantly.
PC gamers may not be happy about the lack of Steam deck upgrades in the near future, but stabilizing hardware specs for years is the norm in the console world. For example, Nintendo could have introduced a ‘Switch Pro’ based on a more powerful Nvidia SoC by now, but the only upgrade the Switch console has seen in its five-year lifespan is a better OLED. It’s a display.
Also, if you’re a company that’s just entered the console market and intends to stay there longer, you could do worse than ask Nintendo for guidance.
