This past February the Steam Deck celebrated its third birthday. And based on the rocky performance of some fairly recent AAA games on Valve’s popular handheld, Avowed and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth being two examples, it’s currently going through a bit of a terrible threes kinda situation. Naturally, poor performance for major titles has led many to wonder when we’ll get a fully fledged successor to the mini PC. While no such thing has been announced or should probably be expected any time soon, the rumor mill is spitting out some interesting fodder for speculation.
Valve has been clear that we shouldn’t expect a so-called “Steam Deck 2” until it feels there’s enough of a breakthrough in battery-powered processors to warrant a capital-U Upgrade, and in a recent episode of the podcast Moore’s Law Is Dead (ht to Tom’s Guide), host Tom N/A and YouTuber Jimmy Champagne said that sources within Valve have told them that the company is sticking to that plan. In fact, the silicon that seems likely to power such a future device could put it on par with PS6 performance, or whatever the next Xbox is called (I’m hoping for NeXbox, personally).
The chip at the heart of all this speculation is the AMD “Magnus” APU, itself only rumored to exist for now. As highlighted by Tom’s Guide last week, various internal code names and AMD leaks point to Magnus being a likely candidate for powering next-generation consoles, which the Steam Deck “2” might be aiming to compete more directly with.
This is good news for those hoping for future Steam Decks to deliver cutting-edge processing power. The rumored Magnus chip might not arrive for another year or two, so we’ll still have to bide our time with the Steam Deck OLED as Valve’s “flagship” handheld for a while. But when we do get that upgrade, it sure sounds like it’s aiming to wow our eyeballs out of our skulls.
Should the Steam Deck be bigger, better, faster, soon?
Please don’t burn me at the stake for being the somewhat luddite-adjacent witch that I am, but I’m content with what the Steam Deck delivers presently. I do not think we “need” a Steam Deck 2, even if Avowed looks like this:
Personally, I’ve always rather enjoyed the Steam Deck as a pocket PS4 of sorts. It’s a machine I can use on the go to jump into some titles from the past that aren’t so old as to be something I’d fire up in RetroArch, but aren’t so new that I’m going to be left with 30 minutes worth of battery life after a single play session, either.
In other words, for now I’m okay with some experiences—Cyberpunk 2077 and the like—not being at their absolute best on the handheld. I think it’s fine for there to be experiences that are better had on a PC or console that doesn’t need to offer a compromised version of the game in order to not devour all its battery life in minutes. Valve, I’ll wait for 2030 for a new Deck. My library is big enough and I’m patient.
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