The Steam Deck 2 hasn’t even been announced yet, but already handheld gamers are pretty clear about where it needs to improve on its predecessor. In a poll run on our site, a massive 64% of readers surveyed (at the time of writing) said performance was the most important upgrade they would want in the next iteration of Valve’s handheld.

Surprisingly, second in line was battery life, with a fifth of those polled stating this was the most important upgrade. This is despite both LCD and OLED handhelds not exactly shining for gaming on-the-go endurance. Battery life varies wildly depending on performance and Valve claims between 3-12 hours and 2-8 hours of gameplay for the OLED and LCD models respectively. Tests from PC Gamer show the difference performance targets make, with GTA V managing just 2 hours at 60 FPS; this leaves plenty of room for potential improvement.

Interestingly, there seems to be no real desire for a larger screen size either – suggesting many are happy with a 7.4-inch diagonal screen, as well as the current 1280 x 800 resolution. At the bottom of the list were features such as VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and Storage, the latter of which we are not surprised about as there are plenty of effective ways to increase this with the current models. As for VRR (currently one of the key benefits of the ASUS ROG Ally), it is certainly a welcomed feature, but it doesn’t quite match the level of demand that performance does.

What will give the Steam Deck a big performance boost?

While little is known about the Steam Deck’s successor, we do know that it is unlikely to feature AMD’s Ryzen Z2 chip, the latest handheld chip designed for gaming performance. The Steam Deck was featured in CES 2025 marketing materials back in January when AMD revealed its next generation of chips. However, according to Pierre-Loup Griffais, a Valve coder who is “currently working on [the] Steam Deck,” there will be no Z2 Steam Deck.

While the likes of the Lenovo Legion Go S runs on the new Z2 Go chip, which is partly powered by AMD’s RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture, the original Steam Deck uses a 6nm AMD APU with Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture for the CPU and GPU respectively. In other words, it has fallen behind the competition as far as hardware power goes – and fans want to catch back up. Valve has already said it is waiting for a “generational leap” before it commits to a sequel, and this will guarantee the biggest performance uplift between the two Steam Deck generations.

While Steam Deck still clearly has the market share, Valve will certainly not want their hardware to be left behind, and so we are expecting a successor to the Deck to come sooner rather than later.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.