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Valve Deckard: Latest leak reveals early specifications of long-awaited Valve Index successor
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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I'm aware. The Deckard was originally rumored to be based on an AMD chip.
I thought this for a long time. The AI 395, with a 40-CU GPU, seemed easily powerful enough. Unfortunately, that's also the issue--it runs at 55W by default. That's too much heat to strap to your face, and it'll drain a 100Wh battery in less than two hours anyway. (That's the maximum size of battery you can take on a plane in the US, so exceeding that would be a very bold choice.)
The Steam Deck gets away with less power (often 15W) because it's running games at lower framerates and a lower resolution, but that's not a good option for VR.
I'm definitely curious to see what they actually do with the Snapdragon, though. Maybe some kind of recompilation tech? Or maybe just partnerships with devs who have already released on Quest to start a new store for standalone stuff, along with the streaming tech they've already got. I really want it to be good.
Limiting the TDP of the chip is not really a problem considering the ARM chips are not more powerful either. If they can run Beat Saber and other slimmed down PCVR games, it's sufficient.
Looking at how many revisions they went through it seems like they came to the conclusion that running x86 on ARM is better than running x86 directly with a TDP limited chip.
Hopefully we will find out later this year.
ETA Prime tried running the 395 at lower TDPs, and the result was that it lost most of its performance advantage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r8JpqfqBpvQ
Which really shouldn't be too surprising, I guess--all those CUs need power.
I do think power requirements for this level of performance will keep dropping over the next several years, but it doesn't seem like it's quite within the necessary power envelope at this point.