Recently, the Steam Deck designers told The Verge that they don’t intend to improve the performance of the next generation Steam Deck, but should focus on improving the battery life and screen quality of Steam Deck. However, major upgrades are still considered when there are major changes in the computer architecture.
Pierre-Loup Griffais, Steam Deck Designer, said, “I think we will choose to maintain this level of performance for a longer period of time and will only consider changing performance levels when we see obvious benefits.”
Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais said they couldn’t wait to see the battery life and on-screen display of the upcoming Steam Deck mobile device.
The Steam Deck is powered by a custom Aerith processor with four Zen 2 cores clocked at 2.4~3.5GHz. The RDNA 2 GPU consists of 512 stream processors running at 1.0~1.6GHz. Due of the processor architecture and performance problems, many games can not have a smooth experience.
Griffais explained the situation: “Right now, all Steam decks can play the same games and our goal is to give users an idea of the level of performance they can expect when playing games and let developers know what their goals are.” … having this one size fits all is precious”
A plan like the Steam Deck isn’t new, and keeping hardware performance consistent is standard practice in the handheld game console industry. Just as Nintendo hasn’t launched “Switch Pro” with an improved configuration for a long time, it just brought a slightly updated version with higher battery life and better display effect.
