The exact quote:
It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. 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.
A desperately needed view in an industry of fashionable e-waste. Apple, Google and now Microsoft: I’m looking at you
I just sold my 4090 after playing some latest hit AAA games I didn’t like at all and I play only indies on deck, it’s the best gaming device ever
Also it seems the only games I liked from hundreds of aaa graphics eye candies from recent years are rdr2 and cyberpunk and bg3. I unironically think there are fewer great big aaa games nowadays cmv and I am not planning another xx90 card any time soon
I really think we’ve already eclipsed that “generational gap” with all the massive increases in efficiency in the last year or so. But I’m glad they’re not updating nonetheless. For a variety of reasons.
Nothing yet surpassed Zen2 low power efficiency in the SD. And by low power I mean under 10W power/performance.
New chips scale quite a bit better above 10W though.
Also I’m not sure if that’s actually the HW limitation or just Valve tuning of the power behaviour. It’s possible they can throw in Zen5 and tune it to that efficiency level while getting significant performance uplift over Zen2 at the same power.
Regarding GPU we will need much faster memory support to get any significant advantages even with RDNA4 as most iGPUs are starved for memory bandwidth anyways, not saying that RDNA4 wouldn’t be an improvement, just that it won’t be as big as a leap as it could be with faster memory.
Nothing yet surpassed Zen2 low power efficiency in the SD.
Qualcomm, Intel and Snapdragon have all released chips that blow it out of the water.
As was already mentioned, I’m not discussing ARM. ARM has its own issues with compatibility on top of the Windows to Linux compatibility.
Not sure what you mean by Intel. MSI Claw showed quite abysmal performance at low power vs SD. Regrading their newest chips, I have no clue as of right now.
I’d like to get a Steam Deck but was wondering if it’s getting close to a newer, better version coming soon. This makes me feel more comfortable, not that I have the budget for one right now anyway.
Presumably this will mean a high-performance ARM CPU (comparable to the Apple M series), along with the dynamic recompilation technology Steam have been experimenting with. (It’s unlikely that Intel or AMD will deliver the generational leap they’re talking about.)
This reminds me of an old thread on a random forum. Just when Sims 2 was released they were speculating what Sims 3 would look like.
Someone suggested that the next game will surely be in the source engine!
While your point is more realistic than that I still don’t think valve could pull this off in reasonable time. Translation for games is extremely hard to do right. I think if at all there will be another generation of decks before we see something like this.
It’s “FEX”, Valve have apparently been testing it with Proton.
The Asahi Linux team have their own packaging/tooling around it, but theirs is slower at runtime because they have to run the games inside a VM as well.
