So far, the biggest bourdary for Valve seem to be: no 3 for software, no 2 for hardware (but we may still get a SteamDeck 1: Episode 1… if SteamDeck OLED isn’t already that)
it would be crazy if Valve didn’t produce a Steam Deck 2
They’d be crazy if they did…
a newer generation AMD APU to bring performance up, with a slightly higher resolution screen and I honestly think I would be ridiculously happy.
No, Liam. No, no, no, just no. 800p is not an accident. Using the most efficient processor was not an accident.
Asus says their biggest complaint is battery life. This is where SD reigns supreme, and you’re asking them to undo that.
If this whole Snapdragon ARM thing pans out, that’s probably the next logical evolution. Combine that with the FRORE system coolers and baby you got a stew goin!
I don’t want a Steam Deck 2. I want Steam Deck to live up to the upgradability and customizability that Valve had originally empasized for it.
It would be amazing to be able to just swap the main board for a GPU update. on the OG deck, it’s the single biggest bottleneck I run into. (for docked gaming on a big screen). Plus a better GPU would allow it to run cooler when only doing 720p and quieter on the fan.
The steam deck has only been out for two years. It’s too soon to be thinking about successor.
I would rather have Valve follow a consistent release schedule as Valve should focus more on software improvements and features to squeeze out more potential from the original steam deck and have the third party developers target one handheld hardware baseline for every 5-7 years.
Agreed. The Deck is plenty powerful for most games, and even a lot of newer releases play fine with lower graphics settings, and with the Deck’s screen size and resolution, lower settings aren’t noticeable in most games.
I’ve seen a lot of reviewers also mention that they don’t notice or mind lower framerate on the Deck, either, and I agree; there’s something about the form factor that makes the framerate less important.
Releasing too many SKUs will just confuse the market and lead to fragmentation. 4 years is the absolute soonest I will think higher specs might be justified.
The OLED model was a good choice; a nominal increase in performance with a fantastic display and the exact same shell dimensions. Developers don’t need to target multiple devices if they’re trying to make their games work on the Deck, and accessories all still work (aside from maybe screen protectors, I guess?)
I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to use some proprietary connector to dock it to an external GPU enclosure on some kind of thunderbolt bus. It’s kind of a Nintendo way of making a series S and series X.
Id eat my underpants if there was a single thing the new switch could do that the deck could not, excluding some proprietary bullshit gimmick that the deck could probably be coaxed into.
There’s this beast, which requires some index components to fully operate and will put you out about $1500 USD with the required Valve Index components, but it does look pretty amazing.
Nintendo is running on good will fumes from previous generations of games. Its basically the same strategy Marvel/ Disney/ Starwars, etc… use with franchise management.
The leaks say ps4/ps4 pro levels of performance + games will be optimized specifically for it so it might end up running games better than the steam deck.
Leaks say a lot things, and are almost always wrong. The idea that you could put a PS4 level of performance in a handheld with reasonable battery life is absurd.
Valve put a damn good custom amd apu in the deck, and it’s limited to 15w if they really wanted they could just slap a higher power limit and get way more performance. But then it would run too hot and it’s battery life would be practically non-existent. And considering that was a partnership with AMD to help design that I highly doubt Nintendo has magically figured out something that neither valve nor AMD knew in terms of how to get that kind of performance out of a small power budget
This just shows you have no idea how cooling works. The most you could add to the external dock will be a fan, there’s only so much a fan can do the bottleneck is that your systems cooler is simply not large enough. A fan cannot make up for a copper heat sink that is too small, take a good look at the iFixit teardowns of the steam deck and look at how much copper that thing is working with and that’s already one of the larger handhelds. You couldn’t put a ps4 amount of power through that no matter how much fan you gave it
I’m sure you’re getting that from the many Reddit comparisons. But in every one of those I’ve looked at the one thing that they forget is that the PS4 is playing at 1080P and the steam deck is playing at 720P.
If you use the official dock on a 1080p monitor the steam deck starts to fall behind the PS4 rather quickly. It is true that on paper the steam deck Apu is getting close to the PS4 but that’s without taking into account the TDP that the steam deck has set or the fact that steam deck is running at a lower resolution.
It gets even Messier when you take into account that not all games will run at 1080p on the ps4, some of them have Dynamic resolution support to maintain better performance at which point comparing the games becomes extremely difficult.
But if you just look at Absolute raw CPU and GPU compute numbers the steam deck isn’t quite at the level of the PS4 which makes sense because it doesn’t have access to quite as much power. It is much newer which is why it gets as close as it does. And if it had a 20 watt TDP I’m willing to bet it could beat it in most things, but as it stands because of the limitations of the cooling necessitating a lower TDP it’s not quite there.
You are correct that arm is generally more power efficient but that’s only the CPU, we don’t know what type of Graphics they will be using and for a gaming device that’s a fairly important piece of information. Nvidia doesn’t really make mobile arm gpus anymore so they can’t go with them, and if they go with one of the Arm based gpus those are significantly behind in terms of performance. They are good enough for your cell phone but they don’t compare to AMD or Nvidia.
They probably will use an Nvidia chip, every leak suggests they’re going to use the T239 and even if they don’t use that chip specifically it would make sense to use an Nvidia chip, because like you said, nobody else really makes good mobile gpus.
Way back in June 2021, noted technology leaker kopite7kimi posted a detailed picture of Nvidia’s T234 processor, revealing for the first time that Nintendo would be receiving a customised variant, dubbed T239. In the two years that followed, a wealth of overwhelming evidence has essentially confirmed that they were right. The T239 is an advanced mobile processor, based on an octo-core ARM A78C CPU cluster, paired with a custom graphics unit based on Nvidia’s RTX 30-series Ampere architecture, combined with some backported elements from the latest Ada Lovelace GPUs - and with an all-new file decompression engine for fast engine. It also supports Nvidia’s console-specific graphics API, all but confirming that it’s destined for the next generation Switch.
No, no it can’t. Plenty of videos of people putting absolutely stupid powerful fans on tiny heatsinks with big overclocked cpu and it’s unable to keep up until they swap to a bigger heatsink.
There is a limit to how much heat a given amount of heatsink can disperse and there is a limit to how quickly that can transfer to air. If the heatsink is too small no amount of extra airflow will fix it.
The ratios are the same, you just can’t find videos of people doing it with small things because that’s not as interesting. There is still ultimately a limit to how much a given amount of heat sink can transfer heat to air even with a small processor.
20w TDP would be possible with some extra forced air from a dock. Mainly because some handhelds can be put to 20 tdp, and they technically work although they hit thermal throttling at 90c almost immediately. With a little bit of forced air from a dock you should be able to bring that down to a much more reasonable 80c
There isn’t much call for a Deck 2 yet. I’m more interested in Valve bringing out the Index 2 first. Luckily, we aren’t waiting on the Index 3 yet otherwise I’d be less certain of it happening.
I really want to see Valve champion PCVR as much as FB has been pushing stand-alone VR. There is a decent-sized market there, but it feels like more and more large players are existing VR, leaving FB/Meta as the only one left standing (see Microsoft killing WMR, Sony pretty much abandoning PSVR despite it being the #2 selling VR platform). And as much as I commend Meta/Oculus for their innovations and continued research in this space, I don’t think it’s in anyone’s best interest to see the market get monopolized by Meta.
Especially now they’re forcing people to have FB accounts to use the hardware. I don’t care how much cheaper they are, that alone means I’ll never buy from Oculus.
It’d be news to me if they did but it’s still an account under the FB umbrella and I trust Zuckbot as far as I could throw him, which isn’t far no matter what alloy he’s made out of.
Fair. It’s my main reason for not owning an Oculus headset. Sadly Microsoft decided to turn my WMR headset into e-waste later this year, so I will need to find a replacement in due time.
The HP Reverb G2 v2 was the highest resolution headset on the market for a while. And it comes with the same headset solution the Index uses.
Sure. It has some flaws, such as the hand tracking accuracy not being as good as some other headsets (some people felt the inside-out tracking wasn’t as accurate as traditional lighthouse based approaches, but it’s still plenty accurate for pretty much any game I’ve played with it) but at the price point this occupied when new there was really no better value for people that wanted a headset with as little setup as possible and absolutely fantastic fidelity and resolution.
It’s a true travesty that Microsoft can just axe the entire platform with no way for users to continue using their still perfectly functioning devices.
In this day and age, I really think that should be illegal and Microsoft should face legal fallout. Just the nerve to claim to be a “green” company while actively making decisions to brick working hardware is bull.
I know. I’d just like the market to be more than a defacto monopoly with Meta selling 85% of all headsets. Especially given their privacy track record.
What would a "Steam Deck 2" be in peoples minds? Less incremental changes? The repairability and modability of the Steam Deck kind of means it doesn't have a direct comparability to console "alternatives". Not to mention the less closed software architecture it provides.
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