In the leaked info, we know that Valve has an upcoming device that will use the same APU as the current Steam Deck. We don’t know if this will be a new VR headset or a Steam Deck hardware refresh. Even though using the same APU means there won’t be a performance increase, there could be various other improvements in an upgraded Deck like a better screen, etc. What would you like to see in a partial hardware upgrade?
The dream? User swappable battery. I would gladly trade up for that
That’d be so nice. With a very small internal battery so you can swap batteries without turning it off
That sound nice on paper but reality is different. I have had two laptops with double (24Wh)batteries (Lenovo T450 and A485) and batteries in both of them degraded fairly quickly compared to other single-battery models.
Or even just living on charger then, but yeah that would be sick!
an upgraded Wifi chip, the deck’s kinda sucks
id also like either VRR or OLED
Why does it suck? Asking because i wanted to buy a deck and i will definitely use it for streaming.
it doesn’t handle 5ghz very well, which leads to insane artifacting and input lag spikes
This is sad to hear. What streaming app do you use? Steam Link or Moonlight? On my Shield TV moonlight is insanely better than steam link
I used xCloud actually. It handled Moonlight/Sunshine moderately well but steam link sucked
Compared to my laptop or phone, when I’m in the furthest spot away from the AP, it will drop out. Other devices stay connected, just slow down
I noticed that yesterday with my deck, I was a bit far away from the AP yesterday and while my phone was connected fine the deck wasn’t able to connect at all; it put a pause on me trying to resume AC6 on the deck until I could get it back in range to update.
Increased serviceability, especially when it comes to the battery.
Dual USB ports, one on top and one on bottom.
Hall effect controllers.
Increased efficiency/performance of course
Maybe a slightly bigger/better screen
VRR would be the #1 upgrade. A mobile chip with mobile thermals and a mobile battery cannot consistently keep ahead of the screen refresh. The screen has to be the one to step down to where the APU is at.
Hall effect sticks, mandatory. My factory sticks started acting up after about a year. The Dreamcast could do it, don’t tell me that they’re too bleeding-edge expensive.
Squeeze a 2280 SSD in there instead of the 2230. I would give up SD and move the radios to a soldered miniboard for this.
Stop gluing the battery down.
My guess is this will be a hybrid VR headset that can play games standalone a la the quest, as well as via PC via tether or wireless.
I don’t really want a steam deck refresh if there is no performance improvement tbh.
That being said, 8"+ 1080p HDR screen with more nits would be nice. Maybe some dual stage/adaptive triggers.
Strip it down and make a Steam Machine out of it. Valve could likely sell a tiny set top box for under $100.
The motherboard alone supposedly costs Valve somewhere around $270, so even with them selling the hardware at a loss I don’t think there’s any chance of getting a set top box for $100.
I know HDR is in the works on Linux same with VRR but that’d be nice to see sooner rather than later.
Just a little bit more RAM. I know 16GB is a good amount but it is shared with the on-board graphics so at least 4 more gigs should help a lot
I think using a filesystem that supports transparent compression would be nice to as well as zram but that might hurt battery life.
For the filesystem, I would recommend checking out this btrfs filesystem conversion for Steam Deck.
I’ve been super happy with it.
Never new that was a thing. I was gonna just install the fedora based alternative.
It works really well, and it will convert your main filesystem without you having to reinstall or anything.
In addition to compression, it also will deduplicate files and set up a scheduled deduplication process.
How much space gains do you get?
On my SSD, I have 517G of files using only 410G of space.
On my desktop using a compression level of 3 ark with all the dlc and mods went from 300GB to 186GB
Apparently, you’re getting both HDR and VRR on the current Steam Deck soon. Currently, in the Preview version, soon-ish in stable.
Announcement: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/3686804163591367815
I’ll be honest, I’m still having a problem understanding the draw of HDR. In about 99% of the places I watch…anything…there is ambient light which increases the black floor to a dark gray. I’m already losing the bottom 2-4 bits of depth to the room lighting and screen glare, giving me more fine control of gradients just makes for a slightly more nuanced (but still indistinguishable) dark gray (assuming I don’t readjust my gamma every time I play, or when the train turns and the lighting is now coming from another direction) . The wider color gamut could be nice, but it would require a much, much better screen.
2280 nvme slot
OLED screen
Bigger battery
More efficient APU
I know it’s not happening, but a more powerful APU is probably my number one.
OLED screen would be my second. I don’t really care about a higher resolution though.
There’s nothing that would make me get a half upgrade like that. But I would like to see improvements toward a steam deck 2. If this gets an oled screen, I’d like to see a model in number 2 with an oled screen
- Larger, OLED screen
- Hall effect sensor sticks
- Better rumble
- Support for 2242 m.2 drives
- Second SD card reader
- Better cooling (I’d gladly have a lump in the back middle if it allowed for a quieter/better fan)
- Better accessory connection options (eg a standard for attaching stuff like extra batteries to the back) - I would prefer this to adding more battery (ie weight) to the unit itself.
- Tweaks to the back buttons so they work no matter where on the button you press
- Some sort of charging dock connection standard to avoid the manual usb connection. Maybe just a usb-c on the bottom
- Small case design change to prevent sd cards being snapped when opening (I haven’t done it, but only by luck)
- Replace the carry case with a plastic cover to protect screen/sticks like dbrand’s (or at least make it a lot smaller)
Better performance/more ram would be good too I guess but honestly having a unified platform with fixed specs to target has a lot of benefits.
Deck lite.
I’d love a ps vita 1000 sized deck
An OLED display with slimmer bezels, and a battery that uses more user serviceable glue
An OLED screen and a more efficient APU (I don’t care for more performance, seeing other handhelds, better performance for 15W is still some years away), that way it can either provide more battery life or the same with an slimmer battery
I would love adaptive triggers like the PS5 controller
I was very surprised it didn’t ship with those at launch, so there’s likely some licensing or patent issue with Sony over them. I wouldn’t expect to see them outside of Playstation controllers anytime soon.
