Steam Deck 2: Gainsborough APU, Expected Technologies and the Future of SteamOS

Summary: Valve says it is working on a new Steam Deck, but it has not revealed the device's chip, release date or price. The Gainsborough codename, spotted in an AMD driver package at the end of September, drew attention because it could be a custom APU built for the Steam Deck 2. In this article I first look at where the current Steam Deck stands, then Valve's official position, what is known and claimed about Gainsborough, the technologies likely to be used in the device, and finally where SteamOS is heading after the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. In each section I have tried to keep verified information separate from rumor and to put a source next to every claim.

Where does the current Steam Deck stand?

The Steam Deck came out in February 2022. The OLED model that arrived in November 2023 refreshed the screen, battery and manufacturing process but left performance almost the same. The official specs of the model sold today are as follows (Valve):

Component	Steam Deck OLED
APU	AMD custom design (Van Gogh), 6 nm
CPU	4 cores / 8 threads, Zen 2, 2.4 - 3.5 GHz
Graphics	8 RDNA 2 compute units (CU), 1.6 GHz, 1.6 TFLOPS (FP32)
APU power range	4 - 15 W
Memory	16 GB LPDDR5, 6400 MT/s, four 32-bit channels
Display	7.4-inch HDR OLED, 1280x800, up to 90 Hz
Battery	50 Wh

Van Gogh was a very balanced chip for a handheld console in 2022. Four years later, it falls behind on two points. First, the Zen 2 CPU cores and the 8-CU RDNA 2 graphics unit struggle even at 800p resolution in demanding new games. Second, RDNA 2 has no matrix units for AI calculations. That is why AMD's machine-learning-based FSR 4 upscaler can only come to this chip in a lighter INT8 version. In May 2026, AMD announced that FSR 4.1 would come to RDNA 3-based cards in July and to RDNA 2 in early 2027 (GamingOnLinux, Club386). Where the Steam Deck falls in this schedule is not clear.

The situation has changed on the price side too. Because of rising memory and storage prices, in May 2026 Valve raised the price of the Steam Deck OLED from $549 to $789 for the 512 GB model and from $649 to $949 for the 1 TB model. Valve's statement was brief: "The Steam Deck itself hasn't changed; the new prices reflect the current state of component costs" (PocketGamer.biz). So the old hardware has become more expensive. That is speeding up talk of a new model.

What Valve has said officially

Valve's stance on the Steam Deck 2 has been consistent since 2022: they will not release a new model for a small performance increase.

December 2022, The Verge: Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve said that in the next generation the priority areas would be the screen and battery life, and that performance would only be increased when a meaningful leap was possible. Yang acknowledged that the battery's adhesive makes it hard to remove and said they were working on this in future hardware revisions (Steam Deck HQ).
September 2023, CNBC and The Verge: Griffais said they did not want more performance to come "at the expense of power efficiency and battery life," and that he did not expect such a leap to be possible "within the next couple of years" (VGC).
November 2025, IGN: Griffais said they had "a pretty good idea" of what the next Steam Deck would be. But he added that they were not after "20, 30, or even 50 percent more performance" with the same battery life, and that the increase would need to be more pronounced than that (Notebookcheck).
September 2026, IGN: Asked whether the memory price crisis had changed the Steam Deck 2 plans, Griffais's answer was "not really." He said the goal was still "a very significant performance increase," and that the question was "how and when" this could be delivered under current conditions (IGN, Pocket Tactics).

The framework that emerges from these statements is this: Valve wants at least around a twofold increase without compromising battery life, and the screen and battery life are also among its priorities. What it has not disclosed is the name of the chip, the manufacturing process, the release year and the price.

Gainsborough: the trace in the driver

The information behind the story that came to the fore in late September and early October is as follows:

Code name seen in the driver: AMD's Adrenalin 26.9.2 driver contains a previously unknown APU code name called "Gainsborough" (The Game Post, TechPowerUp).
The name's connection: The code name of the Steam Deck's first chip is Aerith, and the 6 nm version in the OLED model is called Sephiroth. Both are Final Fantasy VII characters. Aerith's surname is also Gainsborough. For this reason, the name is thought to point to a chip prepared for Valve (IBTimes UK).
Shipping records: According to import and export records, test hardware associated with the name Gainsborough was sent to Asia at the end of July. The chip is said to use a BGA package called FF6, measuring 25 x 25 mm.

There is an important detail here. The same FF6 package is also associated with AMD's Ryzen Z3 series, which leaked as a general handheld console chip (Club386). So the name in the driver is real, but it is not confirmed that the customer is Valve. Gainsborough could be a customized version of the Z3 for Valve, or it could be a chip that Valve is only testing.

What the leaks claim (unverified)

None of the following has been confirmed by Valve or AMD. The sources also contradict each other.

Claim	Source	Status
The Steam Deck 2 will use a ready-made AMD APU instead of a custom chip; target 2028	KeplerL2, April 2026 (Android Headlines)	Unverified
Gainsborough is a semi-custom handheld console APU designed for a single customer	Moore's Law Is Dead, based on a source claiming to work at AMD	Unverified
Manufactured on the TSMC N3P process	Moore's Law Is Dead	Unverified
12 "RDNA 4m" compute units in the graphics	Captain McShotgun; MLID states it could not verify this number	Unverified
"RDNA 4m" is actually an RDNA 3.5-based design with matrix units taken from RDNA 4 added	Kepler_L2, via VideoCardz (Club386)	Unverified
The Ryzen Z3 has 4 Zen 6 and 2 low-power cores; target of 15 W for the Z3 and 25 W for the Z3 Extreme	Gotou_3rd, CaptainMcShotgun, Golden Pig (Club386)	Unverified
Release in late 2027 or 2028	Multiple leaks	Unverified

The first two rows contradict each other. The April claim talks about a ready-made chip, while the October reports talk about a semi-custom chip. They may actually be describing the same thing in different ways: a version of a chip AMD designed for the Z3, prepared for Valve with minor changes. Reports even differ on whether the low-power cores are Zen 6 or Zen 5. Most of the sources rely on the same few people. So the large number of reports does not increase the accuracy of the claims.

Technologies expected to be used in the Steam Deck 2

This section is an assessment based not on official information but on leaks and AMD's roadmap. I also note separately in each heading what is known and what is my own guess.

Manufacturing process: from 6 nm to the 3 nm class

Van Gogh started at 7 nm and moved to 6 nm in the OLED model. If the TSMC N3P in the leaks is correct, this means skipping two full generations of process. In a handheld console, the meaning is simple: far more transistors and higher clock speeds within the same 15 W. Whether Valve can meet its "without sacrificing battery life" condition depends largely on this. The cost of this process is high, though, and that will be reflected in the price.

Processor: from Zen 2 to Zen 6 and hybrid cores

The leaked Z3 structure consists of 4 full-performance cores and 2 low-power cores. The current Steam Deck has 4 Zen 2 cores. Although the core count does not change much, moving from Zen 2 to Zen 6 means a big difference in instructions per clock (IPC). The low-power cores matter for non-gaming tasks: in situations like navigating menus, downloading, or running in the background in sleep mode, they save battery without waking the big cores. For this kind of hybrid structure to work well on Linux, the kernel's task scheduler must be configured accordingly. Since Valve develops SteamOS itself, it is in a position to make this adjustment.

Graphics: matrix units and FSR 4

The main difference will most likely be on the graphics side. If the 12 CU claim is correct, there are 50 percent more units than the current 8 CU. Adding the architectural change to this, MLID's estimate is about 2.3 to 3.2 times the rasterization performance of the first Steam Deck at handheld console power levels. This number is not a measurement but a calculation made from an unverified CU count. Still, it is above the bar Valve set by saying "even 50 percent is not enough."

In my view, what matters more than the CU count is the matrix units in the "RDNA 4m" claim. If these are correct, the chip could run FSR 4's AI-based upscaler with hardware support. In a handheld, the practical meaning of this is: rendering the game at, say, around 540p and upscaling it to 800p or 1080p with a much cleaner image. A lower internal resolution also means lower power consumption and longer battery life. Valve's use of the phrase "up to 4K" gaming with FSR 4.1 for the Steam Machine also shows that it wants to highlight this technology on its own platform (Wikipedia: Steam Machine).

For ray tracing too, RDNA 3.5 and RDNA 4-based units are better than RDNA 2. However, I don't find heavy use of ray tracing realistic in a 15 W handheld. The more likely use is light ray tracing effects and at least being able to launch new games that require it.

Memory: the real bottleneck and the real cost

The performance of integrated graphics units depends largely on memory bandwidth. The current Steam Deck uses LPDDR5 at 6400 MT/s. Feeding a 12 CU graphics unit will require faster LPDDR5X or, in the future, LPDDR6. The leaks say nothing about memory, so this part is entirely my guess. Memory is also today's most expensive component. Valve stated plainly that it had to set the Steam Machine's price far above its initial target because of the memory crisis (Wikipedia: Steam Machine). Memory prices will perhaps be the biggest factor determining the timing of Steam Deck 2.

Screen and battery

Valve has been saying since 2022 that it wants to improve the screen and battery life in the next generation. An OLED screen is already on the current model. Higher resolution, variable refresh rate (VRR) and a more easily replaceable battery are the obvious candidates. The addition of preliminary VRR support for HDMI output in SteamOS 3.8 and improvements to VRR frame pacing (GamingOnLinux) suggest that the software side is preparing for this. However, there is no leak or statement that there will be VRR on the internal screen; this is my guess. On resolution, one needs to be careful: moving to 1080p on a screen of around 7 inches gives a sharper image, but it also means more graphics load. Considering the importance Valve places on battery life, I would expect it to have considered high resolution together with FSR 4.

The future of SteamOS

Independent of Steam Deck 2, 2026 was a turning point for SteamOS. SteamOS is no longer the operating system of a single handheld, but the common foundation of Valve's entire hardware family.

Steam Machine: SteamOS in the living room

Valve put the Steam Machine, which it announced in November 2025, on sale on June 29, 2026. The device has a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor (6 cores), a 28 CU RDNA 3 graphics unit, 16 GB of DDR5 system memory and 8 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory. The 512 GB model costs 1,049 dollars (Shacknews, Wikipedia). Valve says the device is about six times more powerful than an average Steam Deck and introduced a new compatibility label called "Steam Machine Verified." This means that the Steam Deck Verified program has now turned into a system that evaluates separately not for a single device but for devices of different power levels. When Steam Deck 2 arrives, it will most likely get its own label in the same way.

Steam Frame: SteamOS moves to ARM

The more interesting development is Steam Frame. Valve's standalone virtual reality headset went on sale on September 18, 2026 for 1,059 dollars and uses an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 rather than x86 (Wikipedia: Steam Frame). For this, Valve added a three-layer compatibility structure to SteamOS:

Proton: The layer known from Steam Deck that runs Windows games on Linux.
FEX: A binary recompiler that translates x86 and x86-64 instructions to ARM64. This allows the existing Steam library to run on an ARM processor.
Lepton: A layer forked from Waydroid that runs Android applications inside a container on Linux.

Lepton and FEX were released as publicly available packages on Steam in early August (Hardware Busters). This raises an important question for Steam Deck 2 as well: if Valve wants, it could also make an ARM handheld in the future. However, all the Gainsborough leaks mention an AMD x86 chip. My reading is this: Steam Deck 2 will stay x86, while the ARM layers will remain as an option that strengthens Valve's hand.

Third-party handhelds

In January 2025, Valve announced that the Lenovo Legion Go S would be the first licensed third-party handheld console to ship with SteamOS, under the "Powered by SteamOS" label (MP1st). With SteamOS 3.8, released in June 2026, this support expanded. This version added controller support for the ROG Xbox Ally, the Legion Go family, MSI Claw, OneXPlayer and GPD models. Charge limiting and firmware updates also arrived for some Legion Go models. In addition, desktop mode moved to KDE Plasma 6.4 and to Wayland by default, and the Linux kernel was updated to 6.16 (GamingOnLinux).

This picture clearly shows the direction of SteamOS: Valve is turning SteamOS into a general gaming operating system that extends beyond its own devices. There is an advantage here for the Steam Deck 2. When the device launches, the software side will start not from scratch but from a mature foundation tested on different hardware. Every improvement on the Linux side is also reflected directly across all these devices.

Price and timing

There is nothing certain on this, but the data we have points in a direction:

The Steam Machine launched at $1,049 instead of the roughly $750 the engineers had targeted. Valve cited the memory crisis as the reason (TweakTown).
The price of the Steam Deck OLED rose by more than 40 percent in May 2026.
Valve engineers do not expect memory prices to fall before the end of 2026.
The point on which the leaks are most consistent is a release date around 2028.

So I do not expect the Steam Deck 2 to launch anywhere near the original Steam Deck's $399 entry price. With a 3 nm-class chip and faster memory, under today's conditions the price looks more likely to be above that of the current OLED model.

My reading

What is certain: Valve is working on the next Steam Deck and has said repeatedly that it will not settle for a minor upgrade. There is a new APU called Gainsborough in the AMD driver. And SteamOS is now a shared platform covering the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame and third-party handheld consoles.
What is strong but unproven: The name's reference to Aerith and the shipping records suggest the chip is being prepared for Valve. However, the same package also being linked to the Ryzen Z3 weakens this connection.
What is still speculation: The manufacturing process, CU count, graphics architecture, memory type, screen and release date.

Given the way Valve releases hardware, the Steam Deck 2 should not be expected to be the most powerful handheld console on paper. Instead, I think it will try to be the most balanced device in terms of power consumption, battery life and compatibility with SteamOS. Nor do I expect an early announcement at a time when memory prices remain high. I will update this article when new official information comes in.

Sources

Valve and official information

Gainsborough and Ryzen Z3 leaks

FSR 4 and SteamOS