Valve Says Steam Deck 2 Needs to be a Worthwhile Enough Performance Upgrade - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 13 November 2025 / 7,696 Views
Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais in an interview with IGN was asked about a next-generation Steam Deck and he does reveal Valve has an idea of what a Steam deck 2 will be capable of when it comes to performance.
"Obviously the Steam Deck's not our focus today, but the same things we've said in the past where we're really interested to work on what's next for Steam Deck… the thing we're making sure of is that it's a worthwhile enough performance upgrade to make sense as a standalone product," said Griffais.
"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."
Valve this week announced three hardware devices that includes a brand-new Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR headset and controllers, and a new Steam controller.
All three products will ship to regions that the Steam Deck is currently available in, which includes the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia, as well as regions covered by Komodo - Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
Prices for the Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR headset and controllers, and new Steam controller have not been announced. However, the goal is to start shipping them in "early 2026."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Steam Deck should go for better portability, not specs. Compared to Switch it feels somewhat bulky.
It's in a way different market than Switch and Switch 2, so I do agree it shouldn't chase specs.
A model less bulky would be really cool.
Steam Deck 2 or whatever it will be is all but guaranteed to be more powerful than Switch 2, even though it might not be like the leap from Switch to Switch 2 in specs (Nintendo had 8 years).
Just go full on ARM, NVIDIA will sort you out.
This might just happen, given that N1x, which is something that should release in 2026, is based on Grace, which is nVidia's server ARM chip, which supports hardware TSO (Total Store Order) memory, which is what x86 uses and crucial part of why Apple's solution of x86 to ARM translation is so efficient.
That and SteamOS now being on ARM, due to Frame, is probably way for most future handhelds.
Steam and valve charging hard for the next gen arms race
Z1E was already enough of a performance upgrade for me, which is why I swapped from my Steam Deck OLED.
Yeah, this is what I always expected. The latest handhelds, despite costing drastically more than Steam Deck, are like 20-30% perf improvements at times. Valve will need to wait until a true next-gen AMD chip comes out, at TSMC 3-nm or even 2-nm, with like Zen 6c CPU cores and RDNA4 or UDNA GPU cores, in order to have a chip that doubles performance at the same TDP.
Yeah, I don't mobile performance getting much better without some new innovations
Potentially dedicated AI chip to offload some of the cpu/gpu or soc workload
We aren't likely to get RDNA4 or better in mobile chips until something like 2027... So that is around when I would expect a successor to Steamdeck.
And at this point, I wouldn't even consider a device with RDNA2 or RDNA3, at all. They simply aren't good enough.
And that is what I am sorta thinking, still a ways off. It's possible that AMD, thru either looking at the success of Steam Deck, or because of whatever work they are doing with Sony on their potential handheld, might make a "special" chip for Valve that would allow Steam Deck 2 to release in the Fall 2026 timeframe. But like 1 year from now is still the earliest I would bet on.
