In theory, this could compete with gaming laptops and even some PCs, and could wrestle some handheld dominance away from Valve. The Ayaneo Next II will reportedly be powered by a Ryzen 7000 CPU. While the Steam Deck 2 keeps us waiting, though, Ayaneo are looking to jump in Valve’s grave with the recently announced Ayaneo Next II. There are really no rumours, murmurs or news suggesting anything more concrete right now, but we’ll bring you them once we hear them. We could be looking at late 2023 at the earliest, as AMD takes time to perfect its manufacturing process and downscale the architecture to suit battery-powered gadgets like laptops and handheld PCs. That helps narrow down the likely timeframe for Steam Deck 2’s arrival. Beyond a general power hike, improvements include a 50% increase in performance-per-watt over the previous generation and adaptive power management – making it the obvious choice for any Steam Deck sequel. RDNA 2’s successor, the imaginatively named RDNA 3, made its debut in November 2022 inside AMD’s latest high-end PC graphics cards. The PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles were among the first in line, with more battery-friendly versions following later. The current Steam Deck uses custom AMD silicon based on the firm’s RDNA 2 architecture, which was first announced in 2020 and started appearing in consumer gadgets a year later. Valve won’t likely want to launch a Steam Deck successor until there’s a new generation of APU (the combined processor and graphics chip doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to games) available.

Unlike the smartphone world, which is tied to an annual release cycle, the PC hardware market tends to move at a slower pace. Company co-founder Gabe Newell confirmed as much in an interview with Edge Magazine, saying a new Deck would focus on “the capabilities that mobile gives us, above and beyond what you would get in a traditional desk or laptop gaming environment.” But when, exactly?

“I think we’ll opt to keep the one performance level for a little bit longer, and only look at changing the performance level when there is a significant gain to be had.”įirst off, we know for a fact that Valve is at least working on a Steam Deck 2. “Right now the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you’re playing and for developers to understand what to target… there’s a lot of value in having that one spec,” Griffais said.

Will the stream deck be worth it