Steam Deck

A new take on the Steam Machine could potentially knock Xbox out of the market in their current state, and I'm okay with that.

I think people are genuinely looking for a console that doesn't have all the fuckery of Playstation, but with a stronger brand for itself than Xbox, with the simplicity of Nintendo hardware, that costs under $699.

Number must go up

Nothing yet surpassed Zen2 low power efficiency in the SD. And by low power I mean under 10W power/performance.

New chips scale quite a bit better above 10W though.

Also I'm not sure if that's actually the HW limitation or just Valve tuning of the power behaviour. It's possible they can throw in Zen5 and tune it to that efficiency level while getting significant performance uplift over Zen2 at the same power.

Regarding GPU we will need much faster memory support to get any significant advantages even with RDNA4 as most iGPUs are starved for memory bandwidth anyways, not saying that RDNA4 wouldn't be an improvement, just that it won't be as big as a leap as it could be with faster memory.

I wouldn't count AMD out. The whole reason the Steam Deck is so successful is because of AMDs Mobile GPU, not necessarily it's CPU. AMD has been able to make some very efficient GPUs lately, so I do belive with a couple new architectures and die shrinks we will get the generational leap they're talking about.

ARM sounds nice, and it might one day be, but getting x86 translation working flawlessly WITHOUT performance/battery costs at the same time as proton is just asking a heck of a lot.

ARM does best when it's doing ARM things. Since all games are built for x86 with nobody having any intention of compiling for native ARM, I don't really see the point. The whole reason i like the Steam Deck is to play older back catalog games, and those are all x86. Apple pulls it off because they only translate x86 when they have to.

This reminds me of an old thread on a random forum. Just when Sims 2 was released they were speculating what Sims 3 would look like.

Someone suggested that the next game will surely be in the source engine!

While your point is more realistic than that I still don't think valve could pull this off in reasonable time. Translation for games is extremely hard to do right. I think if at all there will be another generation of decks before we see something like this.

I dunno, I expect the Deck to last far longer than the average console if anything. It's a PC, so the games are pretty much guaranteed to keep coming for decades to come, as they have for decades past.

The hardware will fall behind, so I think the point where the newest Triple A games won't be playable will come within a few years, but I bet whatever visual novels or pixelated indie games release in 2035 will still run just fine on it.

Plus, it's designed to be repairable, unlike most consoles. And even if Valve stops maintaining SteamOS for the Steam Deck, you'll still be able to install other distros, so software support isn't something I'm very concerned about either.

It's kind of just becoming an indie or old game portable pc to me. Don't personally have much interest in playing modern graphically demanding titles on it.

It 100% could, everyone thinks they need to be able to generate kratos' abs, Cloud's spikes and Keanu....but they don't. (Removed an extra an)

Shoot. My back log on games is so big, I can be happy with this one for another 5 years before I'd need something with more power.

It would be a real shame that they moved onto the next big thing while the Steam Deck is not even widely available.

Nah. One big piece let's them fit more excellent inside.

Can you use an external controller, and a stand of some kind?