The emergence of the Steam Deck has heralded a fresh chapter in gaming, allowing players to dive into AAA games comfortably from their beds via a portable device. Enthusiasts and gamers are eagerly awaiting a possible follow-up, the Steam Deck 2, especially with significant advancements in the APU sector over the last five years. However, as Valve disclosed in a chat with Reviews.org, such a sequel isn’t on the horizon until there’s a "generational leap in compute."
When AMD introduced the RDNA architecture, it was a big leap compared to its Vega predecessors, especially in performance and driver support. Collaborating with AMD, Valve created a bespoke chip for the Steam Deck, known as Van Gogh, based on just the second version, RDNA 2.
The APU in the Steam Deck houses four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2 iGPU with eight Compute Units; both architectures have been around since about 2020. Even with last year’s OLED update, users didn’t see much of a performance boost.
(Image credit: Valve)
AMD’s newest Strix Point APUs (Ryzen AI 300) are built on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5. When asked about a potential successor, Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang emphasized, "It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence.”
Valve seems to be mirroring the strategy of gaming giants like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. For instance, the latest PS5 Pro still utilizes the older Zen 2 architecture. Though the handheld market has evolved, with competitors like Intel coming in with their Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) CPUs, the changes aren’t drastic enough to warrant a Steam Deck 2 just yet. "We really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck," Yang explained.
From a technical standpoint, today’s APUs aren’t much quicker at power levels under 15W than the previous Rembrandt (Ryzen 6000 Mobile). While Lunar Lake is advancing due to new design decisions, even that hasn’t swayed Valve. This suggests the Steam Deck 2 could bring significant benefits in both performance and battery longevity. Valve is also exploring an ARM64 variant of Proton, so integrating Arm cores with an Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU, akin to the Nintendo Switch, could be in the cards.
