https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-says-technology-doesnt-exist-yet-for-full-steam-deck-20
Don't expect Steam Deck 2.0 anytime soon, Valve has said, as the technology to launch a handheld with an adequately bee…
This is a good thing. We all know valve can't count to 3, so the 2 will be the last one
Steam deck hello this is gabe newel you just purchased a steam deck version more than 2 and less than 4 please email me on GabeN@valvesoftware.com to talk about your game purchases on the steam deck.
Yeah, gamers Nexus was saying that the stream deck guys were telling them that they were waiting for the tech to get good enough to be able to call the device steam deck 2, but that's probably a couple of years out.
Cool, does this mean they'll actually fucking sell the thing in Australia, or is it just forever going to be dodgy resellers?
Imagine Valve going the Apple route: "Fuck it, we will design our own hardware to suit our needs" and making hardware tailored to linux.
Edit: what about qualcomm's new ARM: Snapdragon X Elite?
I think ARM is their end goal, it's really the only option for a handheld console, as today ARM is the only way you'll get enough performance/power rate to make it both good on battery with good enough performance.
Win-win for everyone if they invest in an open source x86 to ARM project, similar like they did with Wine.
The Switch is more than proof enough that pretty much any modern game engine can compile to an ARM target with zero issues (though Nvidia's low level APIs help, not sure about Qualcomm).
But there's zero chance older PC games would ever be updated, and by older I don't mean ancient, some AAA studios stop issuing updates in about one year after release.
So it all comes down to being able to emulate X86 on ARM... The best example we have is Apple, and games run but with a massive performance hit. Microsoft's implementation is borderline unusable. I'm not sure what to expect from Valve.
Checkout Box86/64 and Fex-Emu. They both do x86 translation/emulation on ARM Linux and the results are wayy better than any reasonable expectations I had going in.
I wouldn't say you get that much of a performance hit with Apple games when emulating X86. Rosetta works pretty great for games that are already on macOS but as X86 games. The problem is emulating for Windows games that are also on X86.
It really depends on the game. If the game was truly native, usually the Rosetta performance is good. A lot of games though are JIT, and running a JIT inside a JIT is terrible for performance. The good news is that a game already being JIT is probably easier to patch to be native, for example people have had success replacing the mono runtime used by terraria with a native one and seeing good performance improvements, or running Minecraft on a native JVM. The bad news is it doesn’t necessarily mean the developers will actually update the thing, and mods like this are unlikely to appeal to the vast majority of people.
A lot of that comes down to Unreal and Unity. They have targets built in for everything. Even a web browser if you want.
Nah ARM is barely more efficient than X86. As soon as AMD went TSMC 3nm they got almost similar power efficiency. As the Apple M chips.
Apples "magic sauce" is just being the first one on the new TSMC nodes.
AMD is getting there by optimizing the shit out of memory access and cache. RISC designs by nature have far simpler memory models. AMD has to throw tons of resources into making the x86 pig stay in the air, and they're already flirting with a move towards ARM.
Most of the people who know how to keep that pig flying already work at AMD or Intel. They certainly don't work at VIA Technologies (the third x86 company that nobody talks about, for a good reason). In contrast, any given Fortune 500 could probably hire an ARM team to make a custom chip for their needs provided they had a good enough reason.
Bruh just check, whenever Apple makes massive performance gains it's on a new TSMC node.
I'm not gonna bullshit you and say AMD and Intel do nothing, sure they got some amazing tricks. But in the end it's mostly TSMC making everyone's chips faster and more power efficient.
New Nvidia GPU's magically got power efficient. Why? Check the node of the 3000 series and the 4000. AMD is currently way less power efficient in GPU. Why? They're not on the latest node like Nvidia.
What I'm getting at is there are factors that affect the broader market. Having more people and companies able to work on processors means greater possibility of variation, and therefore has an evolutionary advantage.
There are three x86 companies, and there's not likely to be any others. VIA is barely worth talking about. AMD is currently killing it, but it wasn't always that way. Over a decade ago, a combination of bad decisions at AMD, good decisions at Intel, and underhanded tactics at Intel made AMD nearly collapse. Intel looked smug on its throne, and sat on the same fundamental architecture and manufacturing node for a long time.
This was a bad situation for the entire computer industry. We were very close to Intel being all that mattered, and that would have meant severe stagnation. ARM (and RISC-V) being more viable helps keep that from happening again.
While partially true, the biggest problem is software compatibility. Most software is compiled and optimized for X86 and it won't run on ARM unless recompiled.
How are we going to get everyone to jump ship? Apple had their magic emulation sauce but windows doesn't seem to have that and especially not for Risc5
Much of what people do on computers these days is through a web browser. An even bigger market is servers, which often run Linux and can port things into ARM with less hassle.
People put far too much weight on games.
I'm no expert so id love to be proven wrong but Emulation has more of an overhead than a translation layer, so that probably wouldn't work as well
Emulation is from one architecture to another, translation layers like wine just translate windows instructions to linux, see also: every WIP ps4 "emulator" is just a translation layer, and doesn't have the over head that it would if it was your traditional emulator
This... Is not exactly how it works.
The way windows ABI works is syscalls always should go through dynamic libraries first, while on linux syscalls do syscall instruction/*. How windows syscalls work allows project like WINE just implement those libraries that will do linux syscalls. No instructions translated.
But with other architectures story is different. You either make instruction decoder for processor, make interpreter or make binary translator. First is itanium-way, second is naive way and third is how everyone does. Third is basically compiling one machine code to another. It has overhead of, well, compiling one machine code to another. And it works badly with other JIT compilers.
*there is vDSO, which is dynamic library, that implements syscalls like getting time. It is totally optional.
As I said, I'm not expert, thanks for the info, I'll look that stuff up more when I have time
One thing you can do is translate 3d APIs. This sometimes makes 3d consoles easier to emulate than 2d consoles. PS1 emulation was basically solved when SNES emulation was playable but still had noticeable bugs.
You don't really "tailor" hardware to Linux. You release a driver without a dumb binary blob requirement, or at least document your hardware enough for a kernel hacker to pick it up.
What you mean "you don't tailor it to linux". Sure you can. You can optimize hardware to take over certain tasks. There are entire chips out there made explicitly for certain workloads like encryption, neural networks, RAID, encoding, decoding, mining crypto, what have you. Do you really think there's absolutely nothing in the linux kernel that couldn't be optimized away into hardware?
Won't ever happen, Apple is a hardware and device company that also makes software to go with it; Valve is a software company that also makes hardware to go with it.
And to go arm would mean throwing out the majority of their current store. Plus arm gaming performance is trash, apples chips struggle to run games 10 years old at 1080p 60fps.
Apple made its own chips with the Woz and then became a software company with that dude who got cancer. Only with the M1 did they design their own hardware again. Or am I getting this wrong?
What's to stop Valve from owning the vertical?
And to go arm would mean throwing out the majority of their current store.
That really depends on the game studio support or how good the translation is. Wine games sometimes have better performance than when running on Windows (how they do that magic is beyond me), but adding another layer to translate from x86 to ARM isn't insane. Even Apple wants to do it and they hate compatibility.
Plus arm gaming performance is trash, apples chips struggle to run games 10 years old at 1080p 60fps.
Apple is trash - that we can agree on, but does the chipset really hinder an APU from getting a better GPU? Nvidia is going to enter the ARM space and if they have an inbuilt GPU to make it an APU, then it might blow the Apple chips out of the water in terms of gaming.
Anyway, all I'm saying is I'd welcome "Made for Linux" hardware.
Aren't the AMD in Deck 1 using x86 architecture? It would be impossible to change to ARM now. That would mean starting at square 1 and redesigning everything. And games compatibility would be thrown out the window.
And games compatibility would be thrown out the window.
Computer is like AC. It becomes useless the second you open Windows.
Developers already did half of work for porting on ARM: they ported on Linux.
The whole point of the Steam Deck for me is playing my older games. Unless they get x86 translation working without a performance hit them I'd rather they stay on x86.
Does a performance hit matter for older games (I'm assuming they're already 60+ if not a multiple)
It’s going to depend. If it’s a really old game it’s unlikely to matter. Anything heavy on CPU and particularly single core performance may struggle through a translation layer. A good translation layer on a good chip will probably lead to roughly similar performance in many cases, and most games seem to be GPU limited, so it’s possible it will just work out most of the time. It could always be the case that a critical section of the code somewhere ends up not translating well, leading to poor performance. It would not be terribly surprising for an important loop to end up two or four times slower than it should be, which could cause hiccups.
If the Deck can gain critical mass, they'll be able force the issue. They're already doing it with targeting Linux. The Switch is ARM, and the Switch2 leaks suggest it'll be a better ARM chip, so devs are already targeting it.
Unreal/Unity already go to ARM pretty easily, so it's not a huge deal.
I don't see the Deck as a critical mass device, and if Valve choses to make it one I will probably no longer be interested. The Deck is great because you can tinker to your heart's content in an open system. That just isn't going to fly if Valve decides they want to be the next Xbox or Switch.
Everyone is losing their shirt over ARM because Apple is producing some insanely expensive chips on it that have high performance. I'm not saying ARM doesn't have some advantages, but I think that's a long way out from going into something like the Deck where compatibility is everything. The switch being ARM has nothing at all to do with this conversation.
Back then, we really couldn't engage with a display manufacturer to do exactly what we were after because they didn't really understand the product category, or who would be buying the screen, or why it would matter. Now that picture has changed and we're able to get custom work done.
Why would literally any of those questions be of concern to the screen manufacturer? And I don't understand, did Valve begin work on this in 1918? How could anyone not understand the product category?
Display manufacturers may understand what Valve might want in a screen, but they might not understand how many units of a screen of such a specification they would be able to sell — is it going to be a custom job for just a few thousand of valve’s experimental console (which may have different degrees of success), or is it going to be something that they can sell to more people and a wider audience.
Understanding a product and having practical knowledge about building a speciality part are different ball games
Valve’s hardware strategy up to this point has been to push into new markets via hardware innovation. So I’m very skeptical that the hypothetical successor to the deck is a more powerful version of the deck. They’ll let other hardware manufacturers push those limits and reap the benefits via software sales. The deck was exceptionally successful in that regard, it’s literally opened an entire market segment.
Whatever the “Deck 2” comes to be, I expect it will be poised to capture a different market segment, possibly AR/VR or even modular handheld hardware (totally unfounded speculation), but I sincerely doubt they have much interest in releasing a more powerful version of the same thing every few years.
Who knows, though. Valve’s gonna valve and the only thing they do with any consistency is change things up.
I disagree. I feel more like Steam has been focusing on being able to decouple from Windows. The hardware it has developed was paired with other initiatives to move beyond the Windows desktop. They are now at a point where they've basically created their own Switch that can run without Windows.
I wouldn't be surprised if Steam finally makes consumer Linux on the desktop a thing.
Why spend all those years and all that capital/manpower on R&D for a handheld that is widely touted as a success only to never use any of those lessons ever again? I can't imagine they're just going to one-and-done the Steamdeck. Seems like a massive waste to me.
Why does it matter if they have a better translation now? The steamdeck 2 is a long way away. By the time steamdeck 2 releases I imagine their translation layer will be better than apples is today but probably not better than apples will be when steamdeck 2 releases.
If it's not, then it'll never work, which is why Apple's endeavor is doomed too. There's such a massive back catalogue of games that we can't, won't, and shouldn't abandon that unless you've got x64 translation as good as Proton is for Windows translation, or better, switching to ARM will never work for the latest greatest games. I think that switch to ARM is nearly inevitable, but that translation needs to be excellent first.
Highly doubt it, because pretty much all games are compiled for x86, and would require dynamic recompilation, which I'm turn costs performance.
Or... they could perform the recompilation beforehand just like the precompiled shaders. Hmmm.. that would make it pretty viable!
I think it's well in valves wheelhouse after proton to do something similar and revolutionise x86 to ARM translation. But at the moment better chips still need to arrive for that too be good enough for a product to built around. Which is why it's the first thing i think of when they say they need technology to advance more before they make a new steam deck.
x86 to ARM translation is a fairly different problem than what proton solves, so I don’t think it’s clearly in their wheelhouse. Proton / wine is mostly just an implementation of windows libraries on Linux, but doing efficient x86 emulation on arm is a compiler problem. I would guess that Valve could do it or at least hire people to do it, but it’s a bit of a different skill set. Doing x86 efficiently on ARM (particularly with concurrency) also likely involves some extensions to ARM like Apple does with their chips. I haven’t heard if the snapdragon elite chips have anything for x86 compatibility baked in at all. Frankly, I’m treating the snapdragon elite with a fair degree of scepticism until you can actually buy the thing, but I hope it’s good!
Then maybe those chips that would help with that process is what they're waiting for then.
I don’t think they’re waiting for ARM specifically. If that ends up working out, sure, but if they can get x86 with the right power to performance ratio I doubt they would complain.
Architecture emulation for current gen games is exceptionally unlikely right now. At a fundamental level, wine/proton doesn't change the instructions the code describes, rather it translates the input and output. It's a reimplementation of the same instructions in Windows. For architecture crossing you'd either have to create virtual hardware, which adds tremendous overhead, or recompile the binary. Recompilation is theoretically possible, but for x86_64 to ARM64, for games no less, it's beyond the realm of mortals. It's like how some jokes can't be translated between languages; the structure and vocabulary is just too different.
Microsoft and Apple have some form of x86 to Arm translation at the moment. Also I know it's not something that's really done now. I'm not arguing it can be done right this second cause valve are talking about that there's something they want to do but can't yet and need technology to get a bit better before they move on with their plan. I'm saying this feels like the most logical thing that they're waiting for.
They are hoping for robot gamer companion Steamy^TM^ to develop enough AI empathy where it doesn't kill you in a rage-quit.
Qc X elite says hi
Edit: 2.5-3.5x faster cpu and 2x faster gpu at slightly higher tdp (23W vs 19W). Even if the arm x86 emulation has 40% overhead it'd still be faster and more efficient especially at lower power limits where arm shines.
This is not based on benchmarks from qualcomm, it's based on benchmarks revievers ran on demo units.
You don't need to shift the software to work on arm. Most essential things already work and the ones that don't can be emulated. All valve needs to do is to make it seamless. And unless they also switch to arm its a long shot for amd to achieve a 2x uplift in a single generation.
I hate being that guy… but nobody is emulating windows. It’s a compatibility layer. If they can emulate the x86 instructions (like apple is doing with the M chips and some open source implementations out there) then he compatibility layer could be 100% compiled for arm.
I’ve seen pc games running on phones using this tech. With valve backing, it’s definitely possible, but not before stea,m deck 3
Only 10% of games are verified for Stream OS, with 40% being listed as unsupported. I'm pretty sure Valve is more focused on stability for Steam OS, switching to ARM only complicates things at the moment. Once they have that figured out they can consider ARM. The games that work on ARM now do so because of developer support, most games aren't supported yet.
I'm not saying it's impossible, of course it is. It's just not the time for the Steam Deck to switch to ARM, SD 3 sounds like a reasonable time to consider it.
AMDs 7000 series APUS (and Z1) aren't efficient enough, no performant enough to really warrant a real upgrade if valve is going for a console like experience.
Sure you can get 10% more performance at the same power level, but why bother? Valve had to custom design their own APU to hit their power goals, and there's no way chasing that yearly 0-10% gains is going to pay off.
It isnt though. Check out the phawx on YouTube, he's done extensive testing.
The truth is you can underclock the 7840u but it still is less efficient at those lower wattages. I think if I remember the data right it crosses over around 12watt tdp to being as efficient then more powerful at higher clocks, but at 10w and lower the custom apu in the deck is king. The new apu for the oled deck is even more efficient at those levels too.
The point I think they're trying to make is right now nothing can beat the performance for the power at lower tdp right now, and so they want to wait for newer and better apus so they can maintain the size and battery life a best as possible, while keeping it relatively accessible cost wise.
I own a win max 2 and I can tell you that as nice as that extra 10% performance is, I spent around $1200 and my SO spent $500ish on their deck. That's why valve isn't making a deck 2.0, to hit those higher performance benchmarks the cost raises exponentially, and it isn't worth it right now for them.
It seems like a minor increment over the Steam Deck. Valve is targeting performance per watt, and what's available in a handheld right now isn't going to start running The Quarry at high settings and 60 FPS.