Surprise from Valve. Those led by Gabe Newell have presented the Steam Deck OLED, the first major revision of its successful portable console. However, the list of new features goes beyond the screen, which is now OLED HDR with a refresh rate of up to 90Hz.
First it must be said that the Steam Deck OLED screen slightly increase your size to 7.4 inches, but maintains the resolution of 1280 × 800 pixels. There was no need to make the console larger, since they are taking advantage of the space of the —horrendous— frames of the first model.
Internally, the Steam Deck OLED processor is now manufactured under a lithographic process of 6 nanometers —unlike the 7 of the conventional version—. Be careful, this will not make the games display greater performance, but it will be more energy efficient.
In this sense, the second biggest novelty of the Steam Deck OLED, only behind its panel, is the battery, which is now 50Wh and can offer a continuous experience of 3 to 12 hours. The first model is 40 Wh and offers 2 to 8 hours of play. Autonomy, then, increases by up to 50%although everything will depend on the title we are enjoying.
On the other hand, the Steam Deck OLED embraces the Wi-Fi 6E, a standard that will allow for much faster downloads. One of the negative points of the original model, with Wi-Fi 5, was precisely how slow it could be when downloading games or applications.
Valve comments that it has improved the thermal section, so the OLED Steam Deck won’t get as hot like its predecessor. The sound section, for its part, also improves, managing to offer some more powerful bass.
The Steam Deck OLED will be available in the United States starting next Nov. 16. There will be two versions, one of 512GB and another of 1TB. The latter, by the way, will have a limited edition with a translucent casing. Their prices, below:
- 512GB: $549 dollars
- 1TB: $649 dollars.
- 1 TB Limited Edition: $679
Yeah, It is more expensive than the original Steam Deck. Fortunately, Valve will continue selling this model, leaving only the 256 GB variant for $399. If you’re not interested in taking advantage of the huge benefits of OLED, the LCD laptop is still an excellent option for its price.
Don’t expect Steam Deck 2 anytime soon
The announcement of the Steam Deck OLED has inevitably made us think that a second generation of the laptop is already being cooked within Valve. However, the reality is that this company’s roadmap is very different from Nintendo’s.
In an interview with EurogamerYazan Aldehayyat, one of the engineers behind the Steam Deck, hinted that Steam Deck 2 is still far away. The reason? They believe that the hardware does not yet exist that will allow them to fulfill their vision of a next-generation laptop.
Yes, there are more powerful processors out there, which are already integrated into proposals like the ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion Go. The problem is that the battery is compromised and Valve is not willing to sacrifice autonomy in favor of greater performance.
“Of course, we’d love to get more performance for the same power, but that technology doesn’t exist yet. I think we’d call that Steam Deck 2.0. The original Steam Deck was the first time we felt there was enough GPU performance in “a portable product that also lets you play all your Steam games. We would love to see the performance-per-watt trend progress quickly to achieve this, but we’re not there yet.”
Yazan Aldehayyat.
Despite the above, Valve says they are working on a couple of projects that will take advantage of the current Steam Deck. Both the first model and the OLED. However, he did not specify whether it is hardware or software.