Valve Steam Deck Designers Say They Are Focusing on Optimizations Instead of Performance Upgrades for the Next Model

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais said in an interview with Sean Hollister of The Verge that despite competitors releasing their own handheld gaming devices with the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U 8c/16t APU the performance gains are minimal versus power draw.

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[Tempest]

The very last sentence from the article was interesting: "Lastly, the team shared how the success of the SteamDeck could see Valve’s failed Steam Machines revived in some sort of fashion and also bring about a Steam Controller 2."

 

[Brian_B]

I kinda liked the Steam Machines. They turned into $5 wireless HDMI boxes for me. The only thing I didn't like was that they were limited to 1080.

 

[DrezKill]

Hhhmmm I was really hoping for a Steam Deck 2 that was more powerful...

 

[Uvilla]

Valve is doing things right so fsr. Im sure they will work with amd when the time comes.

 

[Brian_B]

I think this is the right move. The current Achilles heel of the unit is very much the battery.

A second place would be the screen — it isn’t horrible but could be a lot better. And 1280x800 isn’t exactly bleeding edge.

But 2 hour battery life is pretty bad and caps anything you could do performance-wise.

Keeping a similar performance envelope with lower power draw also takes a lot of burden from the fan and cooling mechanism, which gives you more room for battery capacity in the same form factor. That is double dipping on additional run time, which makes it a good choice to attack.

It would be nice if the resolution could bump up to at least 1080 so in-home streaming worked better and let you offload the computation in more cases. The scaling down to 800 just makes it unsuitable right now.