Steam Deck 2.0 could focus on battery life rather than better performance

Now that Steam Deck is from Valve Technically available for about 10 months (And the Widely available for about 2 months), customers are increasingly wondering what Valve might have in store for the inevitable “release 2.0” of PC gaming laptops. While some guys Perhaps looking for a more powerful “Steam Deck Pro,” hardware designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais say battery life and screen quality are the two most likely “pain points” they’d like to address in a new version.

This news comes from Extensive interview with The Verge, where Valve’s pair of designers hinted that maintaining the same goal of core specs for future hardware could be valuable. “Right now, the fact that all Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one goal for users to understand what kind of level of performance they can expect when playing and for developers to understand what to aim for – there’s a lot of value in having that one specification,” Grieves told The New York Times. Verge.

“I think we’ll choose to maintain the same level of performance for a little bit longer, and only look at changing the level of performance when there’s a significant gain to be had,” Greaves added.

Right now, it’s hard to argue that putting more powerful processors in the new Steam Deck will result in a “big win” for users. As it is, there is Over 6,000 Steam titles listed as “verified” or “playable” on the Steam DeckWhich You know? They have little to no trouble hitting the system’s 1200 x 800 resolution at a minimum of 30 fps. It’s not just about validating old addresses; Lots of recent AAA releases like Elden ringAnd the Spider-Man: RemasteredAnd the Death Stranding: Director’s Cut The entire deck has been verified.

The higher Steam Deck Pro might be able to squeeze in a slightly higher resolution or frame rate than some of these games, of course. But as long as there’s a critical mass of games in playable form on the hardware, Valve seems less interested in increasing performance and more concerned with increasing battery life. We also wouldn’t mind if keeping the specs consistent meant the new Steam Deck could be thinner and/or lighter than the current bulky version, but that’s just pure wishes on our part.

Past, present and future updates

Elsewhere in the Verge interview, Valve’s designers revealed somewhat subtle internal changes they’ve made to recently manufactured Steam Deck units. This includes a change in the adhesive that holds the battery in place making it easier to remove and replace, which should improve the problem identified by the teardown specialists at iFixit.

The glowing fan from Delta Electronics in some of the earlier Steam Deck units has also been replaced in newer units with one with thicker foam padding, which you can Buy and install yourself If you have a noisy version. The latest Steam Deck units also improve the feel of the squishy Steam and Quick Access buttons located next to the screen, the designers said.

Valve has tentative plans to roll out additional Steam Deck features via software updates in the coming months as well. This includes the ability to choose a new Bluetooth profile/codec to reduce wireless audio lag and take advantage of Bluetooth microphones to get started. Steam Deck users may soon be able to share power profiles, much as they can currently share control profiles intended for specific games, to help increase battery life and performance through crowdsourcing.

Steam Deck “trippy” dynamic cloud sync feature—which allows you to pick up a game elsewhere once the Steam Deck has been put to sleep—is left up to individual developers to implement. The designers said there are no plans to require such support as part of Valve’s Deck Verified programme.

However, the most intriguing take on the interview concerns the possibility of Valve’s revival defunct line of steam machines. That could mean new third-party mini-computers designed to connect to a TV, now running the new and improved version of SteamOS from the Steam Deck. While the original effort was steam machines Failed for several reasonsThey could be even more successful these days if they combined greatly improved game compatibility and the proven feature set on the Steam Deck.