Valve Proton DLSS 3 update fuels Nvidia-powered Steam Deck 2 rumours ↺
Currently, AMD is the dominant force in the handheld gaming PC space, with devices from massive players, like the Valve Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally (curr. $499.99 on Best Buy), and Lenovo Legion Go, to smaller brands, like Ayaneo and OneXPlayer all using Ryzen APUs for their gaming handhelds. A new update to Valve's Proton compatibility layer, however, might add to the growing pile of evidence that Valve is considering Nvidia for its next-gen Steam Deck 2.
According to the latest Proton compatibility layer update on GitHub, Valve has added support for Nvidia's DLSS 3 and foundations of Frame Generation to Proton. This could admittedly be a nothingburger, but it could also mean Valve is toying with the idea of a Steam Deck 2 running Nvidia hardware.
Valve has said many times at this point that the Steam Deck 2 would need to offer significant performance gains without sacrificing efficiency, and an Arm-based Steam Deck 2 may be just that, especially looking at Apple's impressive gains from making the same shift. Earlier this year, we reported on efforts by Valve to add Arm64 support to its Proton compatibility layer. While those proton-arm64 tags were easily dismissed as an experiment to get Windows games running on machines like Chromebooks or Windows on Arm systems, it's exactly this sort of testing that would be required to make an Nvidia-powered Steam Deck 2 possible.
Nvidia is already rumoured to be combining its GeForce GPU tech with an ARM-based CPU sometime in 2025. Although there are no real indications of what to expect from that SoC, it could prove to be a worthy successor to AMD's Ryzen-based SoC found in the current-generation Steam Deck.
