Just to add as we are discussing mainly ARM vs x86 now… that is just a small part of the whole device. Just look at the SD OLED vs LCD. They managed to have OLED screen that is significantly better than the LCD one while using less power on AVG which is a huge deal to battery life and it either allows you to compensate with more power to SOC to achieve better performance at the same battery life or take the saving and go with higher battery life… and that’s just screen.

Then they optimized the PCB layout, PCB components, etc… to get both better cooling and efficiency.

I think that what is currently holding them back is both the SOC available and the actual efficiency of given parts combined. Getting improvement in both areas at once will lead to a significant change but one or the other alone will not tip the scales towards significant upgrade.

Yes it did not have Lunar Lake to which I said “Regrading their newest chips, I have no clue as of right now.” because we really don’t have any significant testing done at low power for these chips for gaming to compare with SD.

As was already mentioned, I’m not discussing ARM. ARM has its own issues with compatibility on top of the Windows to Linux compatibility.

Not sure what you mean by Intel. MSI Claw showed quite abysmal performance at low power vs SD. Regrading their newest chips, I have no clue as of right now.

Nothing yet surpassed Zen2 low power efficiency in the SD. And by low power I mean under 10W power/performance.

New chips scale quite a bit better above 10W though.

Also I’m not sure if that’s actually the HW limitation or just Valve tuning of the power behaviour. It’s possible they can throw in Zen5 and tune it to that efficiency level while getting significant performance uplift over Zen2 at the same power.

Regarding GPU we will need much faster memory support to get any significant advantages even with RDNA4 as most iGPUs are starved for memory bandwidth anyways, not saying that RDNA4 wouldn’t be an improvement, just that it won’t be as big as a leap as it could be with faster memory.

I still have my Steam Controller but I was itching for better Gyro after playing with Steam Deck so I picked up PS5 controller for PC after doing some research.

I like the PS5 one quite a lot, it does have nice upgrades over the Steam Controller like the adaptive triggers which work only in some games though and the haptics are sooo much better… But the battery life is a complete joke, it’s really annoying.

With SC I’ve just chucked in two AA batteries and was set for 3 months+ with PS5 controller I can barely get 10h with haptics and got around 15h without haptics… And it takes ages to charge too…

The only appeal of this new controller is the touch stick for gyro but other than that this seems quite lackluster imo.

It all depends on how well the performance scales at very low power like 10W for example.

No

What about Deck 2 Revision 1 & 2?

The AA batteries last really, really long and you can get rechargeable ones. You swap them in a few seconds and can continue playing.

The ones that were included with the controller lasted me for several months before I had to swap them.

Yes, it’s imo the best controller to ever exist… For my needs at least. Also the most comfortable