- cross-posted to:
- steamdeck@lemmy.ml
- hardware@lemmy.ml
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The Steam Deck adds something incredibly valuable that the PC market has never had: a consistent target spec for minimum hardware requirements. Upgrading every couple years would create confusion for which version for developers to focus on. They are treating it like a console, not a PC.
I’m glad they are not rushing a new one out until there is some genuine leap in the tech. I think we have become accustomed to pointless upgrades every year which offer nothing substantial other than lining some shareholders pockets.
In my case the longer they take the better 😊
The console approach of 3-4 year refreshes
We all know there won’t be a Deck 3. So I hope they take their time on making the second one perfect.
Rofl
They just call it “4” just to fuck with people
Steam Deck ][
Steam Deck: Alyx
And it’ll be a pre-built desktop, or something.
- 2025: Steam Deck 2
- 2045: Steam Deck 3
- 2050: Steam Deck Eternal
I think this is healthy. People (including myself) are easily sucked into consumerism instead of sustainability.
Better to have a good device that is highly repairable, upgradeable, and modable. That way you can make small improvements and add some high quality accessories without just trying to force everybody to buy the newest shiny device every 18-24 months.
Unless you’re only playing the latest AAA games, the Deck will perform great for many years to come.
I got sucked down the hype/consumerism hole for many years after college, and I blew so much money on buying every new PC part and accessory even though I didn’t need any of them.
Apple has a new event and a new phone and a new watch EVERY YEAR. aren’t we obligated to buy all this shit every year?
Nope, my phone is 5 years old and it is nice to be able to wait for the latest release to get something brand new instead of a year or two old.
That’s good. A Steam Deck 2 might make sense once there’s an APU with double the performance at the same 15W.
Current APU’s are faster per watt, but only at higher power consumption. This means either the battery life sucks, or the handheld is too heavy and expensive with a giant battery.
The current handhelds by other manufacturers are faster, but only a bit. 120Hz are nice, but I don’t even reach 60fps on most titles and it consumes too much power. Games might perform a bit better but everything is still also playable on the SD, so there’s no real point in releasing a second generation. All these devices fill the same niche.
What I expect is a refresh of the SD with an OLED display. Maybe even with VRR and HDR, now that SteamOS has support for it. Farther down the wish list are hall effect joysticks.
I’d like similar things to you as well, which is for the the Deck to get more efficient per watt. On my wishlist:
- VRR
- better display
- lighter and thinner
- better airflow / cooler and quieter (but keep the new fan smell)
- better battery life without compromising size / heat
5a. alternatively, make the battery detachable so we can carry multiple around.
I want long lasting fan smell as well, i was like a feline on catnip the whole first months
However the size is fine for me, but the battery needs a serious buff
Better screen will impact the battery unfortunately
Give us a little tank that we can fill with liquid so the fans stay smelly.
High refresh rates and VRR go hand to hand, so you’d still want that if you want VRR. You just limit the framerate to 60fps or lower if you don’t want the hit to battery life.
As an Australian, I’m not expecting a Steam Deck at all.
Dude, just buy one… pay the extra money and get one, I did and I cant put it down… kogan is where I got mine
If you can deal with the issues of grey import, it’s trivially easy to get one here now. I got a 64gb from Kogan, and since I’m rolling the dice with warranty - did a 1tb SSD upgrade myself.
Definitely happy with my purchase it’s an awesome machine
It makes total sense. Just a bit of a bummer when looking at the reality of devs being awful/not caring about optimising their games. The Deck is just barely hanging on with this year’s big titles.
Thankfully, there’s plenty of older and/or more lightweight options out there.
I’m not sure the Steamdeck was created with the latest AAA games in mind.
BG3 co-op slows my PS5 to a crawl. People gotta be chilling with their expectations of what a £350 handheld can do.
To be fair, the Deck is underpriced for its power level. I unfortunately can’t find the quote but if memory serves they were planning to achieve a 30fps target on the device for a few years, which obviously hasn’t quite panned out. Given that this year has been notorious for badly optimized games, I would personally attribute the problems the device is having to that, rather than the Deck itself being too weak to keep up.
I’m not sure recent games are badly optimised. Just that they’re now going for PS5 levels of power as a baseline, rather than PS4.
You can always cut back a bit on the GPU requirements for lower resolutions and removing raytracing, etc, but the CPU requirements can be pretty rigid.
This is likely to be where the SteamDeck falls short and gets less FPS than expected.
Don’t play big titles on the Deck. That’s not what it’s good at. Play Fez or Tunic or something. There’s a near infinite list of great games that are not technically demanding.
Good. Two years is too short of a time for a hardware generation.
I agree, and tbh everything I throw at my deck, it just handles it, a play things like oxygen not included and modded minecraft, I love my deck
Idc about steam deck 2 because I’ve already got a steam deck I’m happy with.
I wonder whether, when the faster Steam Deck 2 comes, it may have ditched the x86 architecture altogether and leapt to a high-performance ARM CPU, yielding more power per watt and generating less heat. If so, that would presumably require Proton to be supplemented with a Rosetta-style translation engine that can convert x86 machine code into ARM.
Currently, outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.
I’d say while it’s possible it’s unlikely, remember that they’re running PC games, all based on X86, the work needed to make Wine/Proton run all of that well on a different CPU set is significant, and would likely break compatibility in unexpected ways, effectively bringing all the recent wins moot and bringing Proton backwards. Definitely something that will likely happen, but more of a long-term goal (unless it’s already in progress and with advances, no idea, but we would all have heard of it already if it was a thing)
With the timeframe this is likely to happen over, it might be RISC-V instead of ARM since that’s an open source hardware platform and ARM seems to be joining enshittification trends (starting with worse licensing terms)
There allready is a transition layer that can be used so they wouldnt have to start from scratch. Box86/64
A few months ago I remember they hired a contractor for arm development, I think they were a member from the Asahi Linux project
there already is a project for x86 to ARM translation on Linux called box86, and there’s another one for x86_64 called box64 havent heard about them in a while but I remember seeing a video of someone playing doom 3 on a raspberry pi with it so it seems very promising
The only thing I wish they had done is an OLED screen.
Honestly this is a good thing, IMO. If we ever want devs to optimize for a given device, they need to know that it won’t be obsolete immediately. Hopefully seeing that Valve isn’t rushing to make a new device will give them confidence in that.
The only upgrade I expect for newer iterations of 1st gen SteamDeck is a more efficient APU providing the same performance to prolong battery runtime.
Same. And larger battery. And larger resolution screen, even if it’s not driven at full resolution most of the time. I’d like to have the option especially for media and text.
I’m not after a Steam Deck v2, but I’d love a v1.1 with Thunderbolt support. I’ll buy a Steam Deck the moment it will happily play with an eGPU without a Dremel getting involved.
Currently the ROG Ally is the only one of these with eGPU support, right? And it’s still only for their proprietary ones?
Its fast enough just give me some usb4 so I can use an egpu.