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[News] Steam Deck OLED review: Includes specs on new screen and other improvements
(www.polygon.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
307 points (98.7% liked)
Steam Deck
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That's the whole point. They had to walk a thin line between making an attractive upgrade and pissing off the existing users. If they had made the deck more powerful, the old ones would suddenly have been obsolete. I think they did a good job of that. And no, I'm not buying the new one either.
I'm pretty sure it has more to do with current chip technology not actually changing that much in the, what, 2 years since the deck first released?
Also obsolete is a pretty strong word for what - if it had stronger internals - would likely end up being more expensive than current models.
I think it's two things.
Firstly, the landscape hasn't changed that much as you said. People will say the Z1 Extreme/7840U is available and while that's a lot more powerful, the difference isn't night and day to what the Deck's APU offers at lower wattages. I wouldn't be surprised to see another custom APU made in cooperation with AMD. The Z1 Extreme is basically an 7840U, a chip made for notebooks, and usually not gaming notebooks. Sure, even the GPU it comes with is faster than what's in the Deck, but I don't think CPU/GPU power is balanced well for gaming. With a custom chip design, they'd be able to strip away unnecessary pieces of the silicon, like excess PCIe lanes and probably some other stuff, resulting in a smaller die, which then results in less power draw.
Secondly, there's compatibility. Developers often include a graphics preset specifically for Steam Deck in their games nowadays, and having two hardware configurations with a huge gap in performance would mean they'd have to include two. Sure, people in this community are mostly fine with setting their own graphics preferences, but I'd imagine there are many people out there who just want to start playing as soon as the game has downloaded.
Yeah, it's just a big enough upgrade to be a little envious, but not feeling like I got ripped off.
The way I'm looking at it, I'm still very satisfied with my current deck and this upgrade shouldn't change that. But still, damn, OLED...
Also keeping pricing and margins on line.