Monday, October 21st 2024
Valve Won't Follow Yearly Release Cadence with Steam Deck, Holds Until "Generational Leap in Compute"
In an interview with Reviews.org, Valve's designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat discussed the Steam Deck. They talked about the console's future and confirmed that it will not have a yearly release schedule like most handheld console makers. Usually, makers of handheld PCs and gaming consoles like ASUS with its ROG Ally, GPD with its Pocket, Lenovo with Legion GO, and many others follow a yearly update structure of its products to put the latest and greatest chipsets into their products. However, Valve is taking a more conservative approach to updating its famous Steam Deck console.
"We're not going to do a bump every year," said Lawrence Yang, adding that "There's no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that's kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that's only incrementally better. So 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. But it is something that we're excited about and we're working on." The infamous successor to the original Steam Deck, Steam Deck 2, is currently shrouded in mystery. We don't have much information about the hardware that will power it, nor is there a release date. However, as Valve notes, it will be a "generational leap in compute" bringing more gaming capability to the platform. With many competitors releasing handheld gaming consoles, we are expecting Valve to come out with a new console soon.
Source:
Reviews.org
"We're not going to do a bump every year," said Lawrence Yang, adding that "There's no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that's kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that's only incrementally better. So 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. But it is something that we're excited about and we're working on." The infamous successor to the original Steam Deck, Steam Deck 2, is currently shrouded in mystery. We don't have much information about the hardware that will power it, nor is there a release date. However, as Valve notes, it will be a "generational leap in compute" bringing more gaming capability to the platform. With many competitors releasing handheld gaming consoles, we are expecting Valve to come out with a new console soon.
46 Comments on Valve Won't Follow Yearly Release Cadence with Steam Deck, Holds Until "Generational Leap in Compute"
If you have the audacity to call the new generation "new", then at least make sure that it is (looking at you, AMD, Intel and Nvidia).
i dont mind if the next steam deck comes 4 years later... but i do wish it has more vram, ram
I personally don't like smartphone companies are doing. This overproduction produces way too much e-waste.
Personally, I only buy a new phone when the current one's battery has given up.
As for generational leap compute, my guess would be they're waiting for AMD to release SoCs with UDNA/RDNA5 at N3. Doubling or tripling performance at the same 10W TDP should be attainable at that point.
It’s as if it's like a PS5 vs a PS5 Pro.
GPUs with GDDR6 instead of GDDR5 have a 10% boost, but seeing as the memory is shared with the CPU it may be more.
How else can you squeeze more performance at 15w?
There isn't a generational gap nor was that a year ago. Heck Valve wants to be sure that RDNA4 will even be what AMD says it will be. a way more power efficient GPU. Don't forget the deck is based on Zen2 with RDNA already. They want something to be at least twice as powerful and probably more like 3 times more powerful than the current deck. You need to see the Steam Deck more as a console (with the release frames to match) and less as a PC/laptop kind of thing.You're mistaken it for a RoG Ally. The biggest issue with the steam deck is that you need to remove the sd card when you open it up. Many SD cards were broken in half because people forget to pull them out before they open the Deck. The RoG Ally has known issues however with the SD card reader to blatantly not working at all. However I believe newer versions have been updated.
Intel and AMD on the other hand have been a joke the last few gens at more like 5-10%. I'm actually glad they focused more on power effiency so at least there is something interesting happening for CPUs. X3D was another jump but mainly just because Ryzen was so cache starved beforehand. We're at the point with 8c/16t CPUs that no average end user can possibly use more threads than this (that isn't doing workstation compute tasks), they have nowhere to go with clock speeds either, so they are a stalemate since it seems very difficult to make large IPC gains.
If RDNA4 continues this trend (or scales similarly with the power budget of the Ally) there's isn't that large of a jump as Valve seems committed to occupy the low power segment only.
It also makes existing hardware feel relevant for longer as well.
Hopefully, Strix Halo will be able to show what a SoC with GPU L3 can do for optimized power efficiency.There is no RDNA4-based SoC, AFAIK. After Strix Point and Strix Halo with RDNA3.5, the following SoCs should have UDNA or RDNA5 iGPUs.RDNA4 is supposed to be cost-effective, not power-efficient.
Being cost-effective probably means Navi 48 and 44 are relatively small chips, which AMD will be trying to clock as high as possible to make them competitive to Nvidia's offerings with larger chips. And if they're clocking them very high (word is they'll be averaging >3.1GHz?).Just a generation ago Nvidia was making Ampere on Samsung's older 8nm (half node of 10nm) which is definitely inferior to TSMC's N7 that AMD used for RDNA2.
If it's something to do something productive, IE work, where there are actual needs for faster than fine lets do it. If it's for other things like entertainment than don't.
Gaming is by far the biggest and worst offender especially PC gaming which is by far the biggest problem. TVs, audio, and most items last years. In some cases decades. That is what should happen. The non stop computer, phone, and tablet upgrades when you are not actually using them for anything productive is a massive issue.
Valve is taking the right approach. Let it sit and bake until there is a large leap to be had. Until then work on Steam OS and look at ARM solutions to get rid of x86.
id rather have x86 where i can still open documents made in windows 3 and retrieve data if needed or where my 15 year old phenom ii can still boot windows and linux and run some modern games.
ARM on desktop seems like one of those corporations manufacturing consent situations to get you to buy into a locked in platform where you are forced to buy new hardware.
Aya weekly hardware releases made me lose all interest on their offerings.