Gaming PCs are getting more powerful every year, with new desktop and laptop systems coming out every year with the latest chips from Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. But the Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo game consoles, as a rule, are updated about once every five years. This allows companies to sell the same hardware for a longer time, while game developers can create designs to match the specific capabilities of the hardware throughout the life of the consoles.
Valve’s Steam Deck is a portable gaming device that blurs the line between PC and console. Technically it’s a Windows Pocket PC, but it doesn’t look like there will be updates for it in the coming years. Valve has no plans to release a next generation Steam Deck with more powerful hardware for at least a few more years, and all of Valve’s current console models have pretty much the same specs.
As Valve designer Lawrence Young and engineer Pierre-Loup Griffet told the media, so far there is no talk of a new version of the console. Instead, developers optimize the software and regularly release SteamOS updates. At the same time, Steam Deck can also work under Windows, but it is the Linux system that is the main one.
While the list of supported games continues to grow, developers add new features, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and HDR graphics. It looks like Valve will only update the hardware when needed. So far, there is no particular need for this.
