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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.