One of our favourite pieces from the past 12 months. Originally published May 4, 2022.Valve hasn't confirmed whether it's genuinely working on a follow-up to the Steam Deck, its handheld gam
One of our favourite pieces from the past 12 months. Originally published May 4, 2022.
Valve hasn’t confirmed whether it’s genuinely working on a follow-up to the Steam Deck (opens in new tab), its handheld gaming PC. However, it is definitely looking into something akin to a Steam Deck 2. Company president Gabe Newell told Edge (opens in new tab) that shipping the first generation unit “helps frame our thinking for Deck 2”, and that the company would like to see the new handheld as a “permanent addition (opens in new tab)” to PC gaming. Whether Valve makes the next-generation PC handheld or it lends its SteamOS to someone else to do, we have plenty of ideas as to what we’d like to see make the cut.
Some of our suggestions are fairly realistic: improvements we’d like to see after spending some time with the Steam Deck ourselves, and some arguably less so. When it comes to pushing the boundary of what’s possible with today’s technology, our pie in the sky dream decks are definitely wild enough to make a Valve engineer sweat. But hey, a PC gamer can dream.
Ultimately, Valve won’t have any immediate plans to upgrade the Steam Deck—like many of you, we’re still waiting for our original orders to be fulfilled, and who knows when there will be general availability of the portable PC. But that means there’s plenty of time to figure out what’s next for the handheld, because whether the Steam Deck is the best version of it or not, there’s a whole lot of potential for handheld PC gaming.
Jacob Ridley, Senior Hardware Editor: There’s a major shift in integrated GPU power on the way. A shift that could see both AMD and Intel offering much more performance in a compact system on chip package. For Valve, or just handheld gaming PCs in general, that could be a way to offer much more than 720p performance on the go. We’re talking discrete graphics card performance from a single chip incorporating CPU, GPU, and other crucial systems.
Since the Steam Deck is already powered by an AMD processor—a four-core, eight-thread Zen 2 chip with 8 CUs of RDNA 2 graphics power—I’d assume a follow up would also play ball for the red team. AMD has confirmed two new APUs, known as Phoenix and Dragon Reach, which would reportedly come sporting the upcoming Zen 4 architecture—also destined for Ryzen 7000 processors on desktop. Rumour has it even the low-end Phoenix chips could come with up to 24 CUs from either the existing RDNA 2 or upcoming RDNA 3 graphics architectures. The exact GPU specification we can expect to see in these chips is yet to be confirmed by AMD, but we’re talking a major increase in frame rates at higher resolutions here—even on the low-end something akin to the performance of the Radeon RX 6500 XT (opens in new tab).
Arguably this is a pipe dream, of sorts. The power demands of such a chip would likely be pretty considerable for a portable handheld. So far we know it intends to drop Phoenix chips down to 35W, which is already quite a bit thirstier than the current Steam Deck’s max 15W chip. And that’s the more parsimonious of the two next-gen APUs. Let’s just skip over the part where someone has to figure out how to cool the thing and hope for the best, yeah?
Katie Wickens, Hardware Writer: Half a month with the Steam Deck has converted me from craving one of the best gaming laptops (opens in new tab) to being a bit of a Deck head. While a laptop would let me pander to my system resource hungry city building habit, I’ve found that I still enjoy RPGs and walking sims just enough to warrant buying a Steam Deck.
