Valve says technology for Steam Deck 2 doesn’t exist yet

Today Valve announced a new version of the Steam Deck portable console. And while this is a relatively big upgrade across the board (the main attraction being the HDR-enabled OLED display), one aspect has remained largely unchanged, namely performance. This should really be increased only in a full-fledged successor, which the company is already openly talking about. New information was mainly brought by Eurogamer magazine.

Of course, according to Valve engineers, it would be great if they could make a more powerful Steam Deck right now, but that was reportedly not possible. “Of course, we would like to get even more power with the same consumption, but such technology does not exist yet,” he said. says hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayat. “We would call it Steam Deck 2.0.”

The truth is that while CPU performance can definitely be improved (from Zen 2 to Zen 4 would be quite a big upgrade), it’s already worse for the GPU as RDNA 3 only offers minimal improvements over the RDNA 2 architecture used for the chip Steam. Deck. So Valve probably wants to wait for new chips from AMD. How many? According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who asked Valve directly, the new Steam Deck could be two to three years away.

However, at the very least it’s nice to see confirmation that the device is actually being built. After all, Steam Deck is a huge success for Valve; according to the company, several million units of this handheld have already been sold.