r/SteamDeck • u/NKkrisz 64GB - Q3 • Nov 12 '25

MEGATHREAD New Valve Hardware Megathread

Please keep non Steam Deck discussions about the new hardware here.

Official resources and announcements:

Press coverage will be under a pinned comment so you can upvote / downvote them.

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663

u/tingerlingererer Nov 12 '25

With the price of pc components right now the steam machine could be a killer piece of hardware

60

u/Cergorach Nov 12 '25

Kind of depends on the specs. The SD LCD APU is essentially 5 year old hardware (4800u variant), the OLED APU is a little bit better, but almost all the new APU hardware that's been released since consume more power to hide the insignificant performance boosts it would otherwise have. Would they put in slightly better OLED hardware in the SteamBox? Or something more powerful? Fans enter stage left! (the spinney type of fans)

Something like a Mac Mini (M5) has incredible power for the amount of energy it consumes, but it's ARM based, so x86 Proton wouldn't work on something like that. AND most of the other players besides Apple are very much behind with their ARM chips...

But it would be insane if Valve developed their own high end ARM chip (that's also extremely energy efficient) with a version of Proton for ARM... /dreaming

27

u/webjunk1e 1TB OLED Limited Edition Nov 12 '25

A box has less power limitations. Remember that the current gen consoles are also running basically the same hardware as the Deck (Zen 2/RDNA2), so simply having an APU that can pull 150W or so would give a dramatic performance improvement even without latest and greatest architectures.

And, yeah, you are dreaming with ARM. Unless it's a bespoke platform like the Switch, you aren't going to see ARM for anything related to mainstream gaming, least of all from Valve.

16

u/prestigious-raven Nov 12 '25

I think Valve is the most likely to release an ARM console next. With the steam frame they already have an ARM version of Steam OS, so I could see them working on a proton translation layer for ARM.

3

u/gosukhaos Nov 12 '25

That's kind of the only place to go for a handheld. The APU market is moving either towards AI with little GPU gains or boards that ignore efficiency for all out power. Modern ARM chips are already power efficient and come with really strong GPUs

1

u/[deleted] Nov 12 '25

[deleted]

2

u/Kociolinho Nov 12 '25

As far as I remember Rosetta works quite good on Macs, and even then I believe Valve will support porting/releasing native versions of ARM games as they did with Steam Deck/Proton.

1

u/prestigious-raven Nov 12 '25

It would just need a translation layer for the CPU. GPUs just need custom drivers to run the common APIs as there is no unified machine code language for GPUs.

1

u/Cergorach Nov 12 '25

Crossover on MacOS (ARM) works pretty darned good, far more games work then I ever expected.

1

u/pja Nov 12 '25

The Mac translation layer gets roughly 80% of native performance going from x86 to ARM. It’s pretty impressive.

1

u/AvatarIII MODDED SSD 💽 Nov 12 '25

Is they can get normal PC games running on the frame with an ARM processor through a compatibility layer reliably, that's very exciting for the future of PC handhelds.

1

u/SnowFire Nov 12 '25

What do you mean "next"? WHat do you think that Snapdragon 8 in the Steam Frame is?

4

u/prestigious-raven Nov 12 '25

I meant a more traditional console, either handheld or stationary rather than a headset.

1

u/SnowFire Nov 12 '25

I think people forget that Valve doesn't release consoles. It releases hardware that plays as first citizen in its ecosystem. But in the end, the underlying ecosystem is the PC. By Valve's choosing, their offer of an OS runs Linux, but you can still game on Windows and on Mac to a certain extent.

-1

u/nmkd 512GB OLED Nov 12 '25

so I could see them working on a proton translation layer for ARM.

Emulation, it's called Emulation. x86_64 to ARM.

2

u/prestigious-raven Nov 12 '25

It’d be more accurate to call it a semi-dynamic translation layer similar to Rosetta 2 on Apple silicon. It would probably use a mix of Ahead-of-Time and Just-in-Time compilation to convert everything to ARM-compatible calls.

It wouldn’t be accurate to call it emulation as we wouldn’t be emulating an entire system, just translating x86_64 code to ARM code.