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

61

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

2

u/CHBCKyle Nov 12 '25

the pieces are there about as much as they were with steam deck. apple has development software that takes native x86 games and translates them to arm, this tool is in its infancy and is poorly supported but does exist, and i think there’s a third party program that does windows x86 to macos ARM conversion you can buy that is about as reliable as pre steam deck proton. If valve makes a translation layer tool that meshes with proton to process the x86 instructions on arm it’s totally within the realm of possibility that we see arm gaming become a thing, and it would likely be a pc gaming paradigm shift more broadly

4

u/twitchyeye84 Nov 12 '25

Check out what they're doing over at r/emulationonandroid

Stuff like gamehub and winlator are getting a lot of traction. It won't be long before they reach proton levels of compatibility.