Will there be a Steam Deck 2? Latest news and speculation

With Valve announcing new hardware, including the Steam Frame VR headset, Steam Machine and Steam Controller, it begs the question: will there be a Steam Deck 2?

We’ll also take a look at when we could see a Steam Deck 2 release date, as well as what we can expect in terms of an upgrade, and how the Steam Deck 2 would integrate with the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, with the latter now in the hands of developers who are said to love it.

It makes sense to ponder such things, as many millions have fallen in love with Valve’s handheld, with the Steam Deck OLED refining the formula into something truly magic, but, when it comes to certain titles, the Steam Deck is starting to feel a little long in the tooth.

There have been other PC handhelds, such as the Xbox Rog Ally, but none of these offer a truly generational leap in terms of features, performance and battery life.

These products are also coming out at a rate that doesn’t lend itself to long-term support in the same way that Valve targeting the same platform for years does, making a Steam Deck a safer bet when it comes to software updates, as well as for replacement parts.

So, with all this in mind, let’s just see what might be in store for us with the Steam Deck 2!

Will there be a Steam Deck 2?

Yes, there will be a Steam Deck 2.

Whether or not it’s called Steam Deck 2, or it takes on some other moniker, is unknown, but Valve is committed to bringing a successor to its venerable handheld system to market, but not for some time yet.

During the Steam hardware reveal that included the Steam Machine, VR headset Steam Frame and the Steam Controller, IGN posed the question to Valve Software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais, who had much to say about the company’s grand vision for the Steam Deck 2, saying that they want it to be a “worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product”.

But by what kind of metric? Griffais told IGN that they are “not interested in getting to a point where it's 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life”, but rather are looking for “a little bit more demarcated”.

With a goal in mind for what to aim for, Valve is now playing the waiting game, as according to Graffais, there are “no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.”

So, what kind of performance can we expect? Read on!

What will the Steam Deck 2 be like?

To ascertain what kind of improvements Valve will make to the Steam Deck, we need only look to the Steam Deck OLED model, which Valve introduced in November 2023, as well as what else is going on in the wider tech world today and in the future.

As for how it will look and feel, it will probably be a lot like the current Steam Deck, just more powerful and capable, so expect to see a Steam Deck 2 verification program and the like, such as there will be for the Steam Frame.

What display will the Steam Deck 2 have?

The Steam Deck OLED, as you may have guessed, introduced an OLED panel that not only produces lovely colours and features brilliant HDR capabilities, but it also upped the refresh rate to 90Hz, up from 60Hz on the original Steam Deck.

What’s missing from that display, however, is variable refresh rate (VRR) support, which automatically adjusts the display's refresh rate to match the framerate of the content shown. This can cause effects such as screen-tearing and juddery gameplay, whereas VRR completely smooths this out.

With that in mind, we can realistically assume that the Steam Deck 2 will have an OLED panel with a high-refresh rate (possibly 120Hz), be VRR capable and have battery life that is at least as long as the Steam Deck OLED.

As for the resolution, this may be one area where Valve opts to keep things the same. The original Steam Deck is 800p, which works massively in its favour, as any increase in resolution is going to knock both performance and battery life, so sticking with a lower-res screen means that any bump in horsepower is going into better settings, framerate, or a combination of the two.

Whilst it may not be super-sharp, 800p is completely acceptable for smaller displays. The increase in resolution isn’t as appreciable as it is for larger screens, such as going from a 1080p monitor to a 4K one.

How powerful will the Steam Deck 2 be?

We can reasonably expect the Steam Deck 2 to be upwards of twice as powerful as the original Steam Deck.

For example, if a game runs at 30 FPS on the original Steam Deck, the Steam Deck 2 might be able to run it at 60FPS at the same settings, but new tech could see much more drastic improvements elsewhere, especially when it comes to newer games. More on that later.

But, as for the guts that will make up the Steam Deck 2 internals, we can assume a bump in memory. If the Steam Deck 2 is to retain an 800p display, 24GB of memory, which is shared between the CPU and integrated GPU, would be sufficient.

This means the Steam Deck 2 shouldn’t run into any video memory-induced performance hitches, such as when games start to stutter as they max out the frame buffer with high-res textures and the like.

What SoC will be powering all this remains to be seen, as Valve itself has stated that such a chip does not exist yet. We do know a great deal of what this SoC will be capable of, however, at least in terms of technologies.

The Steam Deck uses an AMD SoC, and it’s very likely Valve will stick with them going into the future. Owing to Sony and AMD's Amethyst partnership, we know a great deal of what to expect in the years going forward.

The upcoming PlayStation 6 and much-rumoured PlayStation handheld will utilise the latest AMD tech, with GPUs that are much more akin to what we’ve seen from Nvidia in the past few years.

This means much-improved ray-tracing capabilities and machine-learning-based upscaling and frame-generation (such as FSR4 seen in RDNA 4 products, such as the AMD 9070 XT).

Currently, the Steam Deck can only make do with AMD’s FSR3 or Intel XeSS DP4a, which aren’t as advanced as Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s own FSR4 or Intel’s main branch of XeSS and don’t come anywhere close to providing the kind of image quality achieved by the latter.

This is all to say that the Steam Deck 2 will be able to play much more demanding games owing to an increase in sheer grunt, being more performant in tasks such as ray-tracing, as well as by running games at a lower resolution before improving the image with upscaling.

Frame generation can improve the perceived smoothness of a game, but it won’t actually be running the game any faster. Frame generation looks at two frames and generates one or more frames between these two, based on trained algorithms that can reliably predict what it would have looked like. Frame generation is best used when your input frame rate is high enough, though, as otherwise controls will feel vague and muddy, but typically you can see an almost doubling of the output framerate, which would suit a 120Hz panel.

Don’t expect path-traced Cyberpunk 2077 anytime soon, but you may be able to turn on some ray-traced effects, as the Steam Deck 2 GPU will be RDNA 5 or UDNA-based, which are the future graphics technology platforms AMD is working towards.

In conjunction, the fact that Sony may be working on a handheld console (as evidenced by the PS5 power save mode), as well as the fact that many developers will want to target the Nintendo Switch 2, bodes well for how future games will run on the Steam Deck 2.

The catch with all this is that a SoC that can incorporate these technologies whilst still being efficient and offering the massively improved battery life of the Steam Deck OLED is some years off.

Steam Deck 2 release date speculation

We speculate that the Steam Deck 2 will release in 2028.

As we have already stipulated, the Steam Deck 2 is intrinsically tied to the development of the PlayStation 6, the rumoured PlayStation handheld and AMD’s RDNA 5/UDNA graphics technology.

We can realistically expect the PlayStation 6 to release in 2027 at the earliest, but with the ongoing pricing crisis for components, Sony could let this slip into 2028. For context, the PlayStation 4 came out in 2013, with the PS5 hitting the market at the tail end of 2020, with the PS3 preceding the PS4 by seven years as well, hence 2027.

Typically, with new graphics technologies, we see the top-line models, such as the Nvidia RTX 5090, release first, so even with AMD revealing RDNA 5/UDNA, it may take additional time to see the tech work its way down to lower-tier products, such as an SoC that features a processor and integrated GPU.

Valve will also be competing with Sony and Microsoft for AMD SoCs when they launch their next-generation consoles, with AMD itself then competing against the likes of Apple and Nvidia, who will be placing orders with chip fabricators such as TSMC who are always in high demand.

Working in Valve’s favour is that it will be able to place an order for millions of chips, owing to the success of the original Steam Deck, but it still won’t be anywhere near what Sony, Nvidia or Apple will want, making it less of a priority.

How much will the Steam Deck 2 cost? Steam Deck 2 price speculation

The Steam Deck 2 is likely to cost as much as the higher-tier Steam Decks.

Back when Valve was first designing the Steam Deck, Valve went to great lengths to make it as affordable as possible, with CEO Gabe Newell saying that hitting the £349 price point for the original 64GB LCD Steam Deck was “painful”.

Then, after launch, Valve was surprised to see how many opted for the 512GB Steam Deck with the etched anti-glare screen, which cost £569. This will no doubt have informed Valve on what prospective buyers prioritise, and will probably result in a more feature-rich, albeit expensive, successor.

One also has to take inflation into consideration, and the fact that manufacturers who make components such as memory modules won’t let go of the currently inflated prices without a fight.

We also don’t know if Valve will opt for multiple editions as it has done with the original Steam Deck, or will opt for a single version.

With all this in mind, we can probably expect the Steam Deck 2 to cost around £569 to £659.

As of writing, we still don't know how much the Steam Machine will cost, but when pricing is announced, we may be able to get a better sense of what to expect.

How will the Steam Deck 2 work with other Steam hardware?

With the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame, it does outwardly appear that Valve is creating something of an ecosystem, which is true in a sense, but it makes more sense to remove the hardware from the equation and think of Steam itself being the platform.

Steam is hardware agnostic, in that Steam runs on just about anything, save for consoles (for now). If you have used Steam, you will know that things such as saves will be transferred between systems, so if you log into another machine, or your computer completely dies and you install Steam on a new system, you would still retain mission-critical data.

Also, if you have a Steam game installed on one device and want it on another, Valve will download it directly from that device rather than from the internet, provided they are on the same network.

What separates the Steam Deck, Steam Machine and Steam Frame is that they run on a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS, but really, you could install whatever you want on them. You can also install SteamOS on other devices, such as handhelds or AMD-based laptops and desktop computers, if you want to make your own Steam Machine.

You can use a Steam Deck as a controller for other devices running Steam, such as a Steam Machine or Steam Frame, but the most interesting use case for the interoperability of the Steam hardware family would be to connect the Steam Frame to the Steam Deck 2 to stream VR titles from it, but you would get a much better experience from a gaming laptop if mobility was of concern.

So really, Steam, as we have known and loved it for over twenty years now, is the glue that binds all this hardware together.

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