All hail Valve

The deck won me over because of this, devs make the effort to make games run properly to get that Badge, just like they do in consoles, they just have to tune it up perfect ONE time, because there’s just ONE deck.

Given the efficiency improvements across the board, it should actually be faster (but probably single digit percent faster) for any game that runs into power throttling on the first gen hardware.

I’m glad they went the direction of efficiency. It’s cheaper to scale production than a brand new chip. What good does more performance do when you’re looking at a black screen after an hour or two because the battery died so fast.

It’s already a pretty big device to begin with. Eventually I see them splitting the lineup with a thinner Deck Lite and a Deck 2.

The former being same performance as current Deck but significantly thinner and lighter. Doing another die shrink of the current chip would allow smaller battery and cooling while maintaining similar battery life.

Then the Deck 2 being essentially just the form of current Deck but with 50% better performance and maybe capable of RT. They will probably make it a little lighter and smaller but not by a significant amount.

No? They couldn’t have made it more powerful.

That is to say, they could’ve used the Z1 Extreme if they wanted to. Zen 4 and RDNA3 iirc? But that uses much more power and is worse at the Steam Deck’s power target. And surely costs a lot more.

As Valve has said, there exists no chip that’s as powerful at the Deck’s target TDP. And possibly target cost, too. Maybe an Apple chip or whatever, but nothing Valve is actually able to use.

The best they could do was get a refreshed version of what they already had that’s slightly more power efficient. So maybe you could say it is incrementally more powerful?

It’s pretty clear that the Steam Deck is strategically important to Valve, and they’re willing to update it as fast as they can, unlike the Index, even for a small (but meaningful) refresh.

If they had it by now, I’m sure they really would’ve given the upgrade to all the users. But AMD has no such chip. Nothing that matches Valve’s needs.

What most people forget is that the deck isn’t competing as a handheld PC in a PC gaming market but as a console in a pc gaming market.

It’s meant to be even across all users so that developers can tune their games to run on it better. Akin to how console games are tuned.

Cyberpunk 2077s deck setting is an example of this I always like to bring up