Valve clarifies that battery life is just as important as next-gen performance for Steam Deck 2

Valve wants to deliver a Steam Deck successor that has next-gen performance with current-gen battery life.

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The Steam Deck 2 will happen at some point, but for now Valve says the technology to do what they want simply doesn't exist yet. The priorities remain the same for a new Steam Deck handheld with a careful balance between capability and longevity. Valve aims to deliver higher-end performance and power befit of a next-generation machine with a similar power and battery profile to Steam Deck OLED.

In a recent interview with Skill Up, Valve designer Lawrence Yang and software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais briefly discuss what kinds of hurdles they're navigating while thinking about the Steam Deck 2. Essentially, the chip technology doesn't exist yet, but Valve is carefully watching the market and assessing the needs of the Steam community.

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"Anyone can ship something that has a ton of power and can play any game at really amazing settings, but then it'll run for 10 minutes. I think the trick is finding a chip and working with someone to build something that can play games at another level of performance without sacrificing a ton of battery life," Valve designer Lawrence Yang said in the interview, handing it off to engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais.

Griffais gives a more in-depth answer on what the focus targets are for the Steam Deck 2, saying that the device simply won't be made until that delicate balance of performance vs battery life can be achieved.

"We want to have a big performance leap at the same battery life that we have right now. The technology for that simply put just does not exist today.

"Battery life is more about maintaining the current level of battery life that we have with Steam Deck OLED. We're really happy where we got, but for sure just adding power at the cost of battery life is not an acceptable trade-off in our Steam Deck 2 considerations.

"I think architectures are getting better and processes are getting better, but the off-the-shelf chips that you see being used for various handhelds and other devices right now are directly taken from laptop roadmap chips, they're not customized for handhelds, so they're targeting power envelopes that are 30-35W peak, as opposed to the Steam Deck custom silicon which is 7-12 to 15W power envelope.

"But more importantly, it's designed to run efficiently at those levels as opposed to targeting a little bit higher level of performance.

"So we're trying to make sure that we stay there and that we don't compromise on affordability and battery life, because everyone that is using Steam Deck is telling us that that is really important to them."