Yesterday's announcement of latest lounge and VR {hardware} from Valve clearly has many avid gamers clamoring for any information of a extra highly effective model of the almost 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, although, Valve Software program Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that moveable gaming silicon nonetheless hasn't superior sufficient to justify brand-new benchmark {hardware}.
“The factor we're ensuring of is that it's a worthwhile sufficient efficiency improve [for a Steam Deck 2] to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais advised IGN. “We're not eager about getting to some extent the place it's 20 or 30 and even 50 p.c extra efficiency on the identical battery life. We would like one thing just a little bit extra demarcated than that.”
“So we've been working again from silicon developments and architectural enhancements, and I believe we have now a fairly good thought of what the following model of Steam Deck goes to be, however proper now there's no choices in that panorama, within the SoC [System on a Chip] panorama, that we expect would really be a next-gen efficiency Steam Deck,” Griffais continued.
Extra energy, however at what value?
At first look, Griffais' feedback may appear to run counter to the developments we've seen in moveable PC gaming handhelds lately. The eight-core Zen 5-based AMD chip within the not too long ago launched ROG Xbox Ally X, as an illustration, is considerably extra highly effective than the four-core Zen 2 chip within the Steam Deck. The newer handheld can push out decent-quality 1080p graphics at cheap body charges for a lot of latest video games that the outdated Steam Deck struggles to run in any respect.
Take into accout, although, that Griffais stated Valve is targeted on getting these sorts of efficiency enhancements “on the identical battery life.” The ROG Xbox Ally X has a 50 p.c bigger battery than the unique Steam Deck, and it nonetheless totally drains that battery in round two hours when operating essentially the most taxing video games in “Turbo” mode.
