I love my Steam Deck, as any regular reader will know. It's my favourite gaming device but it could always be better right? And with competition hot (hi Nintendo), I hope Valve have more plans.
Now, I'm not dumb enough to think that the Steam Deck is in actual competition with the Nintendo Switch. That's just not a reality. The Switch has sold over 140 million units and continues to sell millions, it's in stores everywhere, people buy it for their children, for themselves and yeah — you get the idea. But still, for us PC fans the Steam Deck (and specifically us Linux lot) and other PC handhelds are simply awesome.
We all knew a Nintendo Switch 2 would happen, there just hadn't been any real proper confirmation, until now. Writing on social media, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa posted on May 7th:
This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.
So sometime before the end of March 2025, the Nintendo Switch 2 will be revealed.
That leads me to think about the future. The Switch 2 will no doubt sell by the truck-loads once again. So let's just set that aside because it's a different market overall. Still, we have other handheld PC gaming vendors appearing often like the ROG Ally, Legion GO, MSI Claw, various devices from OneXPlayer, GPD, Ayaneo and more on the way so there's really a lot of these devices now.
To me, handheld gaming like this is the future. You may think I am heavily biased, and in many ways I am (obviously, I run this website) but I'm a tech-fan. I have a PlayStation, a Switch, an Xbox and more. But it feels increasingly weird to have a dedicated solid box permanently attached to a single TV. I actually don't like that at all now. Being able to take a much smaller device with you to play anywhere, and additionally have the ability to hook it up to a TV whenever you want just feels so much better. Nintendo definitely had the right idea, as did Valve.
We've seen in the past that Valve have said pretty clearly they had plans to keep going, and with the Steam Deck still continuing to sell constantly, it would be crazy if Valve didn't produce a Steam Deck 2. Even though you could argue the Steam Deck OLED is such a ridiculous improvement it might as well be a Steam Deck 2, I want more. A lot more.
The current shell design is just fine, I don't think Valve really need to do many changes there at all. The OLED design gave us enough improvements inside to various parts so thinking on what they should add in for the big number 2: a newer generation AMD APU to bring performance up, with a slightly higher resolution screen and I honestly think I would be ridiculously happy. It doesn't take much. Performance being the biggest one and with more new AMD chips on the way, give it another year for the generation after that (or their refresh) and we could be looking at a really fun performance boost.
So, let's say a Steam Deck 2 announcement in late 2026. Make it so, Valve.
What do you think? And what do you now want from a Steam Deck 2?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: slaapliedjeIs it weird how much I want to just write an entire thesis on how Gilgamesh and Hercules are so similar that many of the key story points for the two could be assumed that Hercules likely stole a lot of elements from Gilgamesh, or in fact the hero stories of the Greeks just expanded on the original Sumerian?And why do we assume that Gilgamesh is original, and not simply a collection of earlier myths and stories that were never written down?
Quoting: elmapulQuoting: grigi* 6-8 cores (no need to go above 8) that's very power optimizedafaik, runing 1 core at 4ghz consume way more power than 2 cores at 2 ghz, so maybe increasing the ammount of cores might be a good idea
Agreed, 4 cores is fine for the current deck, but it would need more for deck2.
Issue is that even with this times of fat multithreading, games still needs a fast single core.
But having 8 zen5c optimized for power, would easily be >3 times as powerful in the same power budget. Note that the zen2 cluster in the Deck is a bit gimped, it doesn't clock well, and due to the memory controller configuration suffers from memory latency issues where the cores just use more power for no performance gain when going over 80% of their rated clockspeed (which is already low).
So I was suggesting to just take that further, as in optimizing for power a little harder would be I think a better solution.
Note the *c cores are basically BIG cores, just power optimized. So don't clock as high. I think currently the 4c cores are about 60% of the area, performs identically clock-for-clock, but delivers only 80% of the clock-speed. All whilst pulling less power at every performance point.
So Assuming they use a core optimized in the same way, you could get a significant speedup in the same low power budget that a handheld would have.
slaapliedje May 13
Quoting: tuubiI actually don't think he was, and that it's just the oldest version of the Epic that we've found. Just like a lot of the old testament stuff has equivalent stories found on old tablets once we started digging up the Sumerian stuff. A whole lot of them refer to a time before the great deluge, where there was much art and culture destroyed.Quoting: slaapliedjeIs it weird how much I want to just write an entire thesis on how Gilgamesh and Hercules are so similar that many of the key story points for the two could be assumed that Hercules likely stole a lot of elements from Gilgamesh, or in fact the hero stories of the Greeks just expanded on the original Sumerian?And why do we assume that Gilgamesh is original, and not simply a collection of earlier myths and stories that were never written down?
Ha, I think about such things a lot, as I try to design my own campaign settings for games. Like how legends form, how religions form (as some of them definitely seem to form from the legends, or even to the point where stuff like 'Oh, the gods gave birth to him, he was a demigod!' certainly could be added to a story to make it more incredible and captivating, or simply some way to excuse a hero that pulled off amazing feats.
Some myths and legends are simply used to describe events that happened in nature. I think as far as Zechariah Sitchin's work goes, the most intriguing thing is his idea that the cosmology of the planets being described in plays by the Babylonians to describe how the solar system was formed. That's just a really cool concept!
Last edited by slaapliedje on 13 May 2024 at 2:58 pm UTC
Quoting: slaapliedjeI do suspect that there was a substantial shift from older stories, just because this story is told from the perspective of a city, a city-state, and that was kind of a new different thing at the time.Quoting: tuubiI actually don't think he was, and that it's just the oldest version of the Epic that we've found. Just like a lot of the old testament stuff has equivalent stories found on old tablets once we started digging up the Sumerian stuff. A whole lot of them refer to a time before the great deluge, where there was much art and culture destroyed.Quoting: slaapliedjeIs it weird how much I want to just write an entire thesis on how Gilgamesh and Hercules are so similar that many of the key story points for the two could be assumed that Hercules likely stole a lot of elements from Gilgamesh, or in fact the hero stories of the Greeks just expanded on the original Sumerian?And why do we assume that Gilgamesh is original, and not simply a collection of earlier myths and stories that were never written down?
Ha, I think about such things a lot, as I try to design my own campaign settings for games. Like how legends form, how religions form (as some of them definitely seem to form from the legends, or even to the point where stuff like 'Oh, the gods gave birth to him, he was a demigod!' certainly could be added to a story to make it more incredible and captivating, or simply some way to excuse a hero that pulled off amazing feats.
Some myths and legends are simply used to describe events that happened in nature. I think as far as Zechariah Sitchin's work goes, the most intriguing thing is his idea that the cosmology of the planets being described in plays by the Babylonians to describe how the solar system was formed. That's just a really cool concept!
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