If you were worried that your Steam Deck would soon become outdated and quickly replaced with the next iteration, you can put your heart (and your wallet) at rest. We’ve still got quite a ways to go before the Steam Deck 2 shows up. We’re talking late 2025 or even 2026.

Back in March RPS did an interview with Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais from Valve. Yang was reported as saying, “a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years.”

Well, Griffais has recently re-iterated that point, according to an email he had sent to The Verge. Griffais is quoted as saying:

It’s important to us that the Deck offers a fixed performance target for developers, and that the message to customers is simple, where every Deck can play the same games. As such, changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly, and we only want to do so when there is a significant enough increase to be had. We also don’t want more performance to come at a significant cost to power efficiency and battery life. I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years, but we’re still closely monitoring innovations in architectures and fabrication processes to see where things are going there.

Even though the current-generation Deck may be having a harder time handling some of the more recent AAA titles out there – such as Starfield – the good news is, SteamOS 3.5 is ready for testing on the Preview branch. Among the many features included in this update, the Mesa drivers have been updated. According to The Verge, Starfield is now “playable” thanks to this graphics driver upgrade; Griffais mentions this was “a targeted optimization effort” to RADV that now supports ExecuteIndirect. ExecuteIndirect – a replacement for DrawIndirect and DispatchIndirect – brings “major performance improvements” to DX12 since it performs “multiple draws with a single API call, and gives the ability to both the CPU and the GPU to control draw calls.”

Then again, there are rumors suggesting Valve may be looking into a modest Steam Deck refresh with the “Sephiroth” audio codec commit to kernel 6.6.