STEAM DECK NEWS – When will Valve release the next model of the Steam Deck, which would be capable of much better performance than the currently available handheld PC that has started a revolution in the market?

There is now a more serious range of handheld PCs, from the Steam Deck to the Asus ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go, but it’s all thanks to Valve’s device. According to the company, there are no plans to replace the currently available Steam Deck, which was launched in 2022, until 2025 or 2026. While a new generation of cell phones is released every year and laptops change models fairly frequently, the Steam Deck has a longer lifespan than that.

Chip efficiency is important in terms of both performance and power efficiency, the latter of which also affects battery life. The more advanced the manufacturing technology used in CPUs (or in this case APUs, because there is both a processor and a graphics chip on the circuit), so the less nanometer manufacturing technology used, the more efficient they become in terms of clocking, but this increases the cost, and battery technology is not improving at the same pace, and currently the only way to ensure longer use is to put a larger battery in the device.

The Steam Deck, while no longer a performance leader, has become competitive in price, but its successor would not be cheap if it were based on Intel Core Ultra instead of AMD, which would not be as powerful (initial reviews of the MSI Claw using it point to this). Meanwhile, it should support more games, create shaders that optimize performance, and not neglect upscaling technology (whether proprietary or AMD FSR).

Asus is already making no secret of the release of the new ROG Ally, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Valve’s new handheld PC is preceded by the release of Asus’ third ROG Ally. For this reason, 2025 might be too early, and Gabe Newell’s company would probably not introduce the Zen 4 processor, but the Zen 5. Therefore, 2026 or even 2027 seems to be the target; by then, the Zen 5 + RDNA 3 combo would be mature.