Steam Deck OLED Interview: Valve Reveals How the OLED Model Came Together

ign.com:

Valve has officially announced the Steam Deck OLED, a new iteration of the popular handheld device featuring an OLED screen, improved battery life, and more.

Ahead of the announcement, IGN sat down with Jeremy Selan and Jay Shaw, two designers who worked on the newly announced OLED model. We asked both designers about making the Steam Deck OLED, including the decision to keep the performance the same as the launch model, and why Valve decided to make an OLED model instead of a true successor to the Steam Deck.

Read on for our full Steam Deck OLED interview with Valve below. If you want to learn more about the Steam Deck OLED, check out our Steam Deck OLED review, as our article on how the Steam Deck OLED stacks up against the Steam Deck LCD and Nintendo Switch OLED.

The Steam Deck OLED launches November 16.

So tell me what we're looking at here. What do you have to show off today?

Jay Shaw, Designer: So today we're looking at Steam Deck OLED. We're looking at a huge update to the Steam Deck line. We've got HDR OLED display. We've got improved battery life. We've got a bunch of improvements across the board, but mostly we're looking at the OLED display.

How did you improve the battery life while dealing with a brighter screen and higher refresh rate, both of which should make the battery shorter?

Shaw: Yeah, there's two big parts to that. One, OLED is considerably more power efficient. Just the architecture of OLED is that, so the performance is going to be better. OLED also takes up a smaller footprint inside the device, so we were able to actually use a slightly larger battery in there without sacrificing weight or ergonomics or anything else. We also have some efficiencies on the APU side. It's gone from seven nanometers