Steam Deck will be future proof, Valve says

The Valve Steam Deck hasn’t even launched yet, and already people are talking about future iterations of the portable PC. In an interview with IGN, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke about the company’s belief that what’s included will keep the platform functional for years to come.

“Everything that’s been coming out this year [that we’ve tried] has been running without issues,” Griffas told the outlet. “I think this is largely a factor of industry trends. If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms, I think that content will scale down to our 800p, 30Hz target really well. If people start heavily favoring image quality, then we might be in a position where we might have trade offs, but we haven’t really seen that yet.”

The Steam Deck will use last-gen AMD CPU and GPU hardware. However, it will also feature LPDDR5 memory that consumer spaces are just starting to use and support. And with ray tracing being the new buzz in visuals, the Steam Deck can technically offer that with the implementation of RDNA 2.

Can the Steam Deck really be “future proof”?

Obviously, no hardware can last forever. Eventually, everything needs updating, upgrading, and replacing. The Steam Deck will be no different, and Valve is aware of that. Despite the aforementioned belief the hardware will stay relevant years into the future, the company knows that it will need to evolve eventually. It’s something that designer Greg Coomer is already thinking about.

“We look at this as just a new category of device in the PC space,” Coomer said in the same interview. “And assuming that customers agree with us that this is a good idea, we expect not only to follow up in the future with more iterations ourselves, but also for other manufacturers to want to participate in the space.” Coomer also added that the team at Valve is hoping other companies join in to make future portable PCs using SteamOS. After all, it’s a free operating system that manufacturers are able to use for their own product as desired.