My personal opinion is that the frame is a bit of a Trojan horse for widening the hardware they can run games (via Steam) on. With folks playing more and more indie and lower power requirement games, the rise of retroid pockets and Android gaming in general has taken off, and initiatives like gamehub lite have made it possible to run even Skyrim on these low power handhelds.
On the same token, the amount of performance per watt that Apple has been able to get out of custom arm based silicon is astounding. Valve has said they wouldn’t release another steam deck unless it represented a generational leap. That sort of leap would be something like the intel —> m1 that Apple produced.
What’s most exciting for me, is better steam support on multiple architectures. I think what’s most exciting for Valve, is their software and storefront running on more devices and providing a better experience than ever before. From VR to the deck to the desktop to the living room, I think their strategy at this point is pretty clear.
We’ve discussed ARM hardware for a future deck a few times here, ever since we learned that valve was working on an ARM compatibility layer.
It seems obvious for a handheld since ARM devices are usually much more battery friendly than x86 devices, but I’ve been told that we won’t see any actual hardware advantages from x86 games running through the compatibility layer. Games that have a native ARM version will perform better, but the FEX layer is just about ensuring backwards compatibility and won’t actually unlock any hardware improvements for pre-existing x86 games.
Agreed there. The only advantage is if you have more performant silicon for a given power envelope that exceeds the compatibility overhead of running through FEX. This is why in early days, Rosetta occasionally did just as well on M1 Mac’s as the Intel based software, with the leap in performance more than overcoming that translation layer impact.