By We’ve got a packed round of Steam Deck news this week. A new leak may have given us our first real idea of how powerful the Steam Deck 2 could be, there’s a neat Decky Loader plugin that turns the Deck into a Bluetooth controller, Valve’s top 20 most played Steam Deck games for September are in, and a fresh Steam Client beta brings some big Remote Play improvements.
Steam Deck 2 leak: AMD’s “Gainsborough” APU
The biggest story is a new leak around the Steam Deck 2. AMD reportedly has a semi-custom APU codenamed Gainsborough, and it’s being linked to the next Steam Deck because of that semi-custom design and its connection to the original Deck’s “Aerith” APU. Both names point to the same Final Fantasy VII character, Aerith Gainsborough, which is a fun bit of continuity if it turns out to be true.
The rumoured specs are a big step up: somewhere between four and eight Zen 6C CPU cores, 12 to 24 RDNA 5 graphics compute units, and potentially TSMC’s 3nm process. For comparison, the current Deck runs four Zen 2 cores and eight RDNA 2 compute units. The leak also suggests a release window of late 2027 or 2028.
This is exciting, and it lines up with when Valve has hinted we might see a Steam Deck 2. Valve has also said it won’t release a successor until the tech catches up and can deliver a proper generational leap without sacrificing battery life or price, and with specs like these, it looks like the tech could finally be there. As always with leaks, none of this is confirmed yet, so we’d treat it as a rumour for now.
Deck as Controller: use your Steam Deck as a Bluetooth controller
Next up is an awesome new Decky Loader plugin called Deck as Controller. It lets you use your Steam Deck as a Bluetooth controller for other devices, and it seems some of the Deck’s own features, like the trackpads, work while you’re using it. The plugin is still in beta and isn’t on the Decky store yet, so you’ll need to grab it from the Deck as Controller GitHub page and install it manually.
Top 20 most played Steam Deck games for September
Valve’s top 20 most played Steam Deck games for September is a great list. Slay the Spire 2 takes the number one spot, Stardew Valley moves up three places to second, Valheim sits at number five, and Diablo IV made the top 10. Balatro fell all the way to the number 11 spot.
It’s also pretty neat to see Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 on the list. It just shows that people are still interested in playing AAA games on the Deck alongside the indie favourites.
Steam Client beta update: big Remote Play improvements
Finally, the Steam Deck got a new Steam Client beta update. On the general side, it fixes a bug that sometimes caused an empty “Steam Family Activity” group to appear in notification settings.
The biggest changes come to Remote Play. The automatic Pyrowave bitrate calculation has been improved for better visual quality, and Pyrowave manual bitrates can now be increased up to 1 Gbit/s, though Valve notes more bandwidth also means more latency. Pyrowave bitrate has been reset to the automatic default, there’s a fix for gradually increasing video latency on slow network links, fewer audio dropouts, a new dialog to help recover if your network can’t handle your current streaming settings, and a Steam menu option to stop desktop streaming.
There are also updates to Steam Input and the game overlay, including a fix for a crash when Vulkan games recreate their swapchain. On top of that, new Steam Controller firmware fixes some Bluetooth BLE connections disconnecting repeatedly, especially on Steam Deck, speeds up how long the controller takes to fully connect, and fixes pairing via a puck connection sometimes failing.
Final thoughts
The Gainsborough leak is the most exciting Steam Deck 2 news we’ve had in a while, and if those specs hold up, it’d be a huge upgrade worth waiting for. In the meantime, this beta is a pretty big update for Remote Play in particular, and it’ll be neat to see it make its way to the stable client. Let us know what you think of the Steam Deck 2 rumours in the comments.