Valve: the next generation of Steam Deck focuses on improving battery life, without performance upgrades

CTOnews.com Steam Deck designers told The Verge that Valve isn't trying to improve the functionality of the next generation Steam Deck, but rather its endurance and display quality. However, Valve may consider a major upgrade once the computing architecture changes significantly.

Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais said:"I think we'll choose to maintain this performance level for a longer period of time and only consider changing it if we see a clear benefit. "

CTOnews.com has learned that Steam Deck comes with a custom Aerith chip, but many games don't run smoothly yet. The system features four Zen 2 cores with frequencies from 2.4 to 3.5 GHz, and an RDNA 2 GPU with 512 stream processors from 1.0 to 1.6 GHz.

Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais say they're looking forward to improving battery life and display in the next Steam Deck console.

"Now that all Steam Decks can play the same game, our goal is to give users an idea of the level of performance they expect when playing the game, and to give developers an idea of what their goals are…It's valuable to have a spec like that,"Griffais said.

While PC gamers may not be happy with Steam Deck's upgrade, maintaining hardware specs is actually a normal practice in this industry. Nintendo, for example, has so far failed to launch the Switch Pro with the enhanced chip, but the Switch has upgraded to a better OLED display.