Source is KeplerL2, who is generally considered a reliable source for insider hardware info, particularly on AMD GPU hardware and AMD SoC for consoles.
Previously I would have personally estimated Steam Deck 2 to release mid 2026-early 2027, but the recent info about an upcoming Steam Machine made me think that maybe I should push back that estimate.
Of course even if we assume this is reliable insider info, a lot can change in couple years, so things can definitely change.
I don’t know why people are so eager for it, the deck is great, it’s a great purchase. I wish I had gotten the OLED, but I’m very very happy with it. I don’t see that it needs to be replaced annually or even every 2-3 years. It’s like the switch, why not go 4+ years before hardware drives that a new one is possible
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There you go, that’s the answer. Can’t just be happy with what we have, not even for a couple of years. Time to throw it away, get the new one!
PC gamers are very excited that there’s a handheld PC on the market thats made by Valve, but they don’t understand its meant to be a low-power gaming device. its not meant to be a 500+fps massive rig with all the trimmings and fixins.
They are trying to apply their upgrade logic/obsessive consumerism to a device that neither wants nor needs that in its own market.
This has been a major annoyance I’ve had too with gamers. It was never meant to play games at 240fps with ultra graphics. It’s meant as a way to make “most” games playable on the road. A great low cost entry point, or something to compliment your big gaming rig. I don’t need an upgrade because it does what it does great, plays most games on decent settings well enough for the duration of a flight or trip. If you want ultra graphics, you will have to pay ultra prices and probably do a big desktop. Even “Steam Deck 2” will still probably only do 30-45fps games on medium, just newer games will be a bit more playable.
I want a higher resolution screen to make specific games more playable, by rendering text and stuff like that at higher resolution (while the rest of the game could keep targeting lower resolutions and get upscaled)
As described in more detail here; https://infosec.pub/comment/17743689
There is a zoom function. Haven’t tried it myself yet as I haven’t had the need yet. But there is on the deck.
I have good eyes, the zoom won’t help me because it doesn’t add pixels to the frame (maybe unless you’re downsampling?). I want more physical pixels, and then higher resolution text to make use of it!
I wouldn’t even call it “low power”. More like mid
When I first got the steam deck, I thought it was so great and used it all the time; I still do.
I told my wife that I liked it so much that I would buy the next one as soon as it released.
After having it for some time, I realized that all the games I play run on it easily and there is no real need to upgrade.
So, I plan to use this steamdeck until it it stops working. I imagine that will be a while as I’m going to repair it when/if something breaks.
I would like a smaller deck though, the current one is hard to hold if you don’t have big man hands
That’s a fair ask IMO. Not wanting a newer shinier one, just one that fits you better.
I want a second one because I know it’ll blow the first one out of the water, with the first one they had to figure out all the r&d from scratch, with the two they should be able to refine the hell out of it, I think there’s a good chance the 2 will be basically perfect. Shame they’ll never make a 3 though.
I’m not really sure what’s not perfect with the OLED already, lol. Maybe a second USB-C port would be nice, so we could charge it while using a non-hub device, or use a cheap hub to add even more controllers? That’s a minor, incremental improvement, though.
It could always be smaller/thinner/quieter, I guess, but I can’t think of anything I’d really want to change with my Deck. I have lots of minor pain points with other tech, but I literally can’t think of anything with the Deck, so I’m curious if you have any specifics, or if you’re just trusting that Valve has put some real thought and research into this and will surprise us with design changes for the better that aren’t obvious.
Hall effect everything, adaptive triggers, higher screen to body ratio, reduced weight, usb-c on top and bottom, enough performance to play spiderman 2 in particular on nice settings, 1080p, detachable siderail controllers, better haptics, better speakers. There’s honestly a lot wrong with the steam deck these things were all off the top of my head, if they fix everything on that list I won’t want any other gaming machine ever, though.
They aren’t going for detachable controllers, most likely. Theoretically they might make a future screen + SoC modular so you can swap a frame (it would kinda make sense from an engineering perspective to build the center similar to a tablet IF you can hit all required specs that way), but even for Valve that’s unlikely. They may prototype it but likely won’t release it.
Would OTOH be nice with a Steam Controller 2 which can fold flat to fit in the same case as the Steam Deck. Also not likely to happen 🤷
Adaptive triggers are fucking awesome
Hall effect joysticks would be great. The rest I don’t really count; obviously, better performance/bigger screen would be an incremental improvement, but I don’t need it. The OLED screen is plenty big enough.
I (personally) would never use detachable controllers and wouldn’t want more moving parts that could break. Haptics and adaptive triggers I don’t care about improving. For sound, I prefer headphones for when I want “good” sound, too, so that wouldn’t make a difference for me.
Even hall effect joysticks are only going to matter to me if my current joysticks break or develop play.
I really do think the current OLED is amazing.
You said you aren’t sure what isn’t perfect, I made a big list and you went “yeah but I’m fine with those imperfections” which is fine so stay with the original, but these are valid areas of improvement.
i’m not, especially the haptics and speakers suck, imo.
quieter
I mean, could it? Maybe it’s because my laptop fans sound like a goddamn Harley Davidson, but I feel like my SD is nearly silent.
Higher resolution. Not for higher resolution games, because at that screen size you won’t pick up everything anyway, but rather higher resolution for text and other visually smaller but important details. I want games to be able to tag a subset of extra important visual details for full resolution rendering, then everything else can keep getting upscaled
Ha!
Maybe they’re saving the conclusions to all their trilogies for the steam deck 3.
…too bad we’ll never get it though.
100% agree. My only gripe is I wish I got the OLED.
Oh, and input lag in Rocket League.
The only reason I want the Deck 2 to release is to get a cheap Deck 1. I don’t really need one, so I’m not paying the price they’re asking for it. If 2 comes out and there are some cheap 1s people are getting rid of, I’ll probably snatch one up. Other than that, I think it plays about any game I’d want to play on it.
I want to get a steamdeck but I feel (felt?) I’m too late in so I figured I’d just wait for the second one…
Same…I was thnking of getting one Q1 2026… Might just wait it out I guess . maybe firmer date by then?
That’s a fair reason IMO. However, knowing that it might be a few years out, then it becomes “is it worth the wait”
Nothing has indicated that a new Steam Deck is anywhere near a release or announcement. They said themselves time and time again that they would want a new Steam Deck to be a significant upgrade on the first one.
As long as a really big performance improvement is not possible there won’t be a new Steam Deck. And I don’t think running Cyberpunk 1080p instead of 800p counts. My bet is that as long as raytracing is as abysmal as it is now on APUs we can’t even dream of getting a new Deck.
Think console generations and not smartphone releases.
Good, there is nothing wrong with the current gen. I want major leaps every few years not marginal improvents every year.
As the kids like to say … Let em cook.
It’ll come out when it’s meaningful and a big leap. They’ve said as much before.
Yup, they’ve straight up said that they’re not interested in iterative upgrades. They said they’d only consider a Deck 2 when the hardware was actually in a place that it would be a meaningful upgrade.
In the meantime, they’re focused on getting devs to actually optimize their games for the SD’s (admittedly aging) hardware. Basically, forcing devs to actually plan for Steam Deck support, instead of just shipping an unoptimized piece of junk out the door and blaming hardware limitations when nothing except the newest cards can play it. There are plenty of games that look gorgeous on the Deck, so we know it’s 100% possible to do so.
The main thing I want, besides higher performance, is higher resolution to increase readability. Do something like what Apple did when they introduced their ultra high resolution monitors - present it as a standard resolution monitor to software, but then let the OS handle stuff like font rendering at full resolution and overlay it.
That way you don’t cause a performance hit from games rendering more pixels than what’s necessary for a small screen in 3D scenes, but the detail you do need is there to see. They should work with game engine developers and get the OS side support of it upstreamed to the Linux graphics stack (presumably the game mode window manager Gamescope would be the first place to build it into). It would work in parallel to the upscaling algorithm for the rest of the frame buffer.
Stuff like puzzle games and platformers, etc, could even have game engine support for tagging certain assets and object edges and symbols for higher resolution rendering, not just for fonts, so it’s easier to see the important things. You could even do stuff like render faces specifically at higher resolution and do the rest at low res with upscaling.
Fucking seriously. They pushed out a handheld that can play AAA games on low settings. It came out ~3 years ago, so they’re on track as any other major hardware developer.
I can wait for 2028, but how about giving us a Steam Controller 2? Take the screen out of a steam deck and call it a day.
It’s coming, expected to launch alongside the upcoming Steam Machine.
This one I’m excited for. A Steam Machine would be great, and my biggest gripe with controller play on my desktop is the missing trackpads mean Steam Input didn’t work. There are games that I choose to stream to/play on my Deck over using my 1440p 32" screen on my gaming rig because I don’t have Steam Input on my desktop.
You know there’s a funny workaround here - stream the game from your PC to the Deck over Steam Remote Play while keeping that PC monitor on, and then use the Steam Deck only as a controller while looking at the big screen. It will add a bit of latency to controls, but it’s surprisingly not bad
What do you mean? steam input works as long as you have steam, your controller doesn’t matter unless it’s a really really rare unsupported controller
I mean using the Track Pads, often for things like radial menus. A lot of PC games need more inputs than exist on a controller.
This would be great, I recently used a regular xbox controller for the first time since I got my deck and it felt so small and all the buttons were in the wrong place and it made me mad.
Take your time Valve.
Oh… I kinda hope so… I just ordered a steam deck yesterday.
I meant to check this specifically before i ordered and i completely forgot
You’re gonna love it
I don’t think they’ll release a new one until they make the leap to an ARM processor like Apple did when leaving x86 behind. But that means they’ll have to make x86 emulator that doesn’t torch the battery. As it is, Proton was an enormous undertaking and it has resulted in a fantastic product. I believe they call pull it off again and we’ll get 20 hours of battery life with better performance.
But that’ll take a few years. I’m in no rush to spend another $600+.
Just a note, Proton is mostly Wine, a program that has been in the making for decades and could be used to play Windows programs (including games) on Linux long before Valve started pouring resources into it. They have “just” concentrated development on games.
As previously discussed, it’s confirmed that Valve is in fact working on a x86 to ARM emulator, probably for their upcoming VR headset.
However from what I understand, we’re unlikely to get better battery life from ARM hardware unless the software/games are actually created for ARM hardware. x86 games running through an emulator probably won’t see much benefit from the ARM hardware even if everything works great.
It’s been 5 years now since Apple moved to ARM. I think that had a big enough impact on the market to start compiling ARM binaries. Those toolchains are much more common now and I think once Steam makes the plunge, you’ll see a ton of games target it directly. As shitty as Apple’s decisions are sometimes, you definitely see them force the markets to move like when they removed the headphone jack.
At this stage, it’s likely they’ll move to RISC-V over ARM if they change architecture. Drastically freer licensing would give them more control and fewer headaches.
Proton isn’t the same as an architecture emulator. It wraps the Windows APIs and translate them to Linux system calls. Translating CPU instructions is more complicated because it’s much more latency and overhead sensitive, and slight architectural differences can drastically blow up performance hits to translation. You need hardware based emulation for some instructions.
Yeah I was just using proton as an example of a translation layer that made the steamdeck possible. RISC-V would be great. The Steamdeck adopting it would also push far more development and refinement in the Linux kernal for that architecture too.
Good choice. As easy to forget as it is, that’ll be the 8th year of the PS5. Probably will benefit from similar supply chains as the rumored PS6/PS5 handheld and whatever MS does. Main shame to me is for people buying a Steam Deck and being stuck with regular sdxc microSD. microSD express or that Biwin mini SSD would be real nice
As easy to forget as it is, that’ll be the 8th year of the PS5
Holy shit, what??
The most culturally mute console generation in my lifetime that will probably be surpassed cultural midness by the PS6. Games take too long to make now
You can upgrade the SSD in a Steam Deck instead of using an SD card. It is pricey though.
I upgraded my 512gb to 2tb for $144.
Ideally they don’t even need to, other manufactures can adopt SteamOS on their handhelds now
That’s great if we start seeing it, but so far the Lenovo Go S is the only one, and Lenovo doesn’t even list the steam OS version on their website in most countries.
I don’t want a beefy Steam Deck 2, the diminishing returns on specs mean nothing to me. I want a Steam Deck Pocket that actually fits in my pocket and runs my favorite 2D indie games.
This is good. It means that when Microsoft and Asus release their ROG Xbox Ally, Valve will be able to lower their price so that it’s affordable and accessible.
Could probably do that anyway - they know you’re going to spend more money on Steam purchases with it.
They know you’re buying Silksong.
Well that’s disappointing.
It took years to even release in my country to the point the hardware was eclipsed by other offerings.
Now I can’t even wait until the next model. Guess I’m never going to have a SteamDeck.
I hope there’s some kind of modular update your steam deck hardware board like framework laptops
That’s incredibly difficult in compact form factors. Modular frames and connectors would also add weight, etc. So far you can basically replace the SSD and spare parts like the joystick. But I’d certainly like to see them try. We’re not going to see them make the CPU or GPU replaceable, but I’ve seen stuff like electrically activated glue for attaching components like screens while keeping it repairable because it’s easy to release with electrical activation again. Would be cool to see Valve make use of stuff like that.
I love my Steam Deck OLED and would only really consider an upgrade for things that improve the experience or reliability. Being able to run low and medium-graphics games locally and stream everything else from my PC with Remote Play is awesome.
I’d only want things like:
- Hall effect or TMR sticks and triggers
- Better battery life(but honestly it’s already great)
- 1080p, but not at the cost of horsepower or battery
- More CPU and GPU power is never a bad thing but I wouldn’t want it at the cost of battery
- Cooler and quieter(it gets warm and loud on Forza 5, TABS, Helldivers 2, etc)
- Thunderbolt with external GPU support on the dock
- More storage is always a good thing and 2230 SSDs pretty much top out at 2TB
- The Bluetooth is laggy but I dunno, Bluetooth just kinda always sucks
and bloody hell Valve put the god damn xone driver in your SteamOS so I can use my Xbox wireless receiver without installing the driver after every update
