Valve unveiled its new batch of hardware for 2026 yesterday, including a new Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and even the Steam Frame VR headset. One particularly beloved device was missing from the pack, though, and that's the Steam Deck. Now, Valve has confirmed that the Steam Deck 2 is still probably years away, noting it is waiting for a major leap in silicon to deliver the performance jump it deserves.
Launched three years ago, the Steam Deck has received only one major upgrade, the OLED variant, with many left seeking a little more juice out of this handheld. Unfortunately, the wait won't be cut any shorter as Valve has just made its priorities clear — it envisions the Steam Deck 2 as a true next-gen leap, not an iterative upgrade. Pierre-Loup Griffais, a software engineer at Valve and the lead developer behind SteamOS, spoke to IGN, clarifying, "The thing we're making sure of is that it's a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product."
Even if you take into account the current PC handheld landscape, the Steam Deck has fallen quite a bit behind when it comes to performance. It's a testament to Valve's optimization through Proton that SteamOS can run so many Deck-verified titles, but its age is showing with some demanding AAA blockbusters, which also affect battery life.
Either extending battery endurance while maintaining similar performance or prioritizing improved frame rates while maintaining the same battery life is not enough. For Valve, the Steam Deck 2 has to provide significant jumps across both aspects with no compromise. And right now, the silicon that exists (despite various advances) is simply not up to the task, according to Griffais.
(Image credit: AMD)
“We're not interested in getting to a point where it's 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there's no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” he told IGN.
To jog your memory, the Steam Deck shipped with AMD's Z1 Extreme chip, which has since been succeeded by the Z2 Extreme — as found in the ROG Xbox Ally X — offering remarkable improvements in low-wattage scenarios and respectable bumps at higher TDPs. But apparently, something like the Z2E isn't sufficient for Valve, and it's betting on upcoming silicon to address even more shortcomings.
AMD does have high-performance Strix Halo APUs at the moment, the top-end model offers 40 RDNA 3.5 CUs, matching RTX 4060 laptop performance. That's a massive jump available to harvest right away, and even if it's efficient, it's certainly not cheap, and a Steam Deck successor cannot compromise on accessibility.
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Therefore, perhaps the next lineup from AMD is what brings Strix Halo numbers to the masses, at which point Valve might opt for it in the Steam Deck 2. These comments echo prior sentiment from the company, such as last year when it said Steam Decks won't have annual releases, and even before that, in 2023, when Valve confirmed the next Steam Deck is at least 2-3 years away, though the timeline likely shifted a bit when Valve's new PC-centric hardware came into the picture.
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