Valve’s recent Proton update hints that the Steam Deck 2 may be in development

The Steam Deck has made a huge impact on PC gaming. Taking cues from the Nintendo Switch, it brought portable gaming to PC fans, which in turn started a huge wave of Steam Deck alternatives, each with its benefits and drawbacks compared to Valve’s offering. Valve has been pretty quiet on the topic of a Steam Deck 2, but certain developments hint that Valve may be in the process of prototyping something.

Valve may be working on the Steam Deck 2

As reported by Notebook Check, there are a few hints that the company may be working on a Steam Deck 2. Of course, this is just speculation, so there’s no guarantee that the Steam Deck 2 is on the way. In fact, Valve has made it very clear that it doesn’t want to bother making a successor until it can provide a significant jump in performance over the first Deck.

So, what are the hints? First, Valve adjusted Proton to work with Nvidia’s DLSS 3 tech. The Steam Deck uses Proton to help get Windows games working on its Linux-based system, plus it uses an AMD graphics processor. As such, tweaking Proton to use Nvidia tech may be a hint that Valve is tinkering with using its GPUs in a new version of the Steam Deck.

Second, we also saw Valve add Proton support for the Arm64 architecture. When we combine these two hints, we can surmise that the gaming giant may be considering a new Steam Deck with an Arm-based processor and an Nvidia GPU, giving that extra oomph over the original Deck to justify making a new model. Let’s hope this is the case and it’s not just Valve adding support for the sake of it.