Valve confirms Steam Deck won’t have annual releases – Steam Deck 2 will be shelved until a generational leap in computer performance happens

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The Steam Deck ushered in a new era of gaming, where you can enjoy AAA titles while curled up in your bed using a handheld device. It’s no secret that gamers and enthusiasts alike are eagerly awaiting a potential Steam Deck 2 with massive improvements in the APU industry over the past five years. However, Valve has made it clear that the Steam Deck 2 likely won’t hit shelves anytime soon until a “generational leap in computing power” occurs, as reported in an interview with Reviews.org.

AMD’s RDNA architecture was ahead of its Vega offering in terms of performance and driver support. With just the second iteration, RDNA 2, Valve designed a custom chip for the Steam Deck in collaboration with AMD, codenamed Van Gogh.

The Steam Deck’s APU featured four Zen 2 cores and eight Compute Unit-based RDNA 2 iGPUs, with both architectures dating back to at least 2020. Even with last year’s OLED refresh, performance improvements were notable for their absence.

AMD’s latest Strix Point APUs (Ryzen AI 300) are based on Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5, and when confronted with the question of a potential successor, Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang replied: “It’s important to us, and we have I have tried to be very clear: we do not do the annual cadence.’

It appears that Valve is taking an approach similar to that of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Even the latest PS5 Pro is still based on the old Zen 2 architecture. While improvements have been made in the handheld industry, with Intel also competing with its Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) CPUs, these are not yet significant enough to warrant a Steam Deck 2. “So we really want to wait for a generational leap in computing power without sacrificing battery life before releasing the real second-generation Steam Deck,” Yang explains.

On the more technical side, APUs today are barely faster at levels below 15W than Rembrandt (Ryzen 6000 Mobile). Lunar Lake is a step in the right direction for its design choices, but if even that is insignificant for Valve, then the Steam Deck 2 could be a big leap forward in performance and battery life. Valve is also working on an ARM64 version of Proton, so using Arm cores alongside an Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU solution is also a possibility, just like the Nintendo Switch.