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Calendar Man is marking the many, many days until a more powerful Steam Deck shows up.
If you're waiting for a more powerful version of the Steam Deck before diving in on Valve's Linux-based portable hardware, you may find yourself waiting a little while longer. In
a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun
, Valve designer Lawrence Yang says it will be "a few years" before the company releases "a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower."
A look at the Steam Deck's performance
over its first year of availability
helps show why Valve might not be in a hurry to release a more powerful portable. The current Steam Deck now supports
over 8,000 titles that are either rated Playable or Verified
by
Valve's official Compatibility program
. And that list isn't just low-end indie games, either; heavy hitters like
Cyberpunk 2077
,
Elden Ring
, and the recent
Dead Space
remake run great on the handheld, and the device can
even handle ray tracing
on
slightly older games like
Doom Eternal
.
That said, the Steam Deck hardware is already beginning to show its age on some recent releases. Games like
Wild Hearts
and
Returnal
will technically run on the Deck but
reportedly
show some significant
frame rate and performance issues
on the portable. While future software or OS patches could help a bit for these bleeding-edge games, the Steam Deck's unchanging hardware may start to look increasingly dated as PC gamers continue to upgrade their rigs with
plentiful graphics cards
(and PC game makers continue to target those high-end desktop users with their newest titles).