2y ago

Valve is committed to bringing Steam Deck OLED 'battery life improvements to the LCD models as well'

www.pcgamer.com

17 comments

You can't BIOS-update the battery size or the CPU node. The gains will be minimal...
- You can download more RAM though.
  
  Remember 640 kB of RAM should be enough for everyone.
  
  If you have an FPGA
- Sure, but minimal gains still add up to more efficient use of what's there now. I see that as a win.
I just want to know if they'll let me replace the screen. I can live with the battery but I'd love an OLED screen.
- the displays are not interchangeable, most internals are completely different.
- You can buy a screen from https://deckhd.com/ it is still an IPS display but this one apparently covers a higher color gamut.
  
  yeah I've seen reviews of that and I am not keen
On one hand I kinda feel bad because I just recently bought a Steamdeck on Valve's word that there won't be new Steamdeck for a few years, but then again, it still works and it will work until the next iteration, maybe a Steamdeck. I would still kinda feel better if Valve didn't make that obviously misleading statement, given that they worked on a steamdeck that is lighting better in all aspects for a long time.
- That's not what they said, though. That might be how it was characterized in whatever retelling you heard, but their comments have always been very specific that a new, more powerful successor wasn't coming any time soon. They never said anything implying they wouldn't update it at all.
  This is the same performance target, just with a nicer finish.
- It's wild reading comments like these, because I thought they made it painfully obvious. All the headlines from that interview clearly delineated that they were talking about a "faster Steam Deck" aka a Steam Deck 2 and not a hardware refresh. Like here's a Verge article from September
  "changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly... I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years"
  All that said, Valve might totally still have a Steam Deck refresh in the works that doesn’t change the performance floor. There’s a rich history of console manufacturers releasing smaller, lighter, and more power efficient versions of the same hardware...

17 comments