Originally posted by Sinder:

Valve,

Suggestions for the steam deck dock 2.0:

1. Up front usb 3 a type and c type ports
2. M.2 and SD card slot
3. If space is a consideration, display-port should be the first to go
4. If released with an upgraded steam deck, dedicated EGPU port.
5. Universal recognition by TVs ( Samsung still sucks)

They’d need to change the SteamDeck to support number 4. That is the one thing i noted as primarily missing for a SteamDeck 2. They need to use either USB4 or TB3 or TB4 with DisplayPort alt-mode.

I’d agree with a pair of USB-C ports on the front for wired controllers and/or charging cables to charge controllers while playing. You can easily get type C to a type A adapter if you have type A cables/devices.

Adding an PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 2280 if they used USB4 or TB4 as noted above would be great to be able to have a larger game collection installed when docked. But again, without increasing the USB3 connection to the dock you have to cut the bandwidth for the external SSD.

And unfortunately, point 5 is a Samsung problem. It is Samsung trying to “work with more things” which don’t strictly follow HDMI spec. You can disable the extended compatibility and I haven’t had an issue with my deck while docked.

Great reply!

1. I imagine this would come with a steam deck two, and your right that functionality would have to be built in to a sd2 to be useful. Tbh this is a niche ask anyways.

2. I would support usb c on the front

3. I am not sure you really need that much bandwidth. We are playing pc games off of SD cards, so while I agree that more bw would be welcome, I am not entirely convinced it is necessary. Regardless, this is also a niche ask.

4. Compatibility with established brands as part of the oobe is a standard development practice. The consumer should not have to adjust obscure settings to get the product to work correctly. For this reason I disagree that this is a Samsung problem alone.

Originally posted by Sinder:

Great reply!

1. I imagine this would come with a steam deck two, and your right that functionality would have to be built in to a sd2 to be useful. Tbh this is a niche ask anyways.

2. I would support usb c on the front

3. I am not sure you really need that much bandwidth. We are playing pc games off of SD cards, so while I agree that more bw would be welcome, I am not entirely convinced it is necessary. Regardless, this is also a niche ask.

4. Compatibility with established brands as part of the oobe is a standard development practice. The consumer should not have to adjust obscure settings to get the product to work correctly. For this reason I disagree that this is a Samsung problem alone.

It’s a Samsung problem because they are the ones defaulting their TVs to use their “extended compatibility” profile to try to work with trash devices that don’t implement the HDMI standard correctly. Valve making their device to correctly implement the HDMI standard is all that Valve should be doing. That is the entire point of having standards. Valve shouldn’t need to break the standard to work with one brands non-standard “compatibility” profile.

Samsung should make that setting default to off so the TV works with in-spec devices normally, and users would need to enable it to try to work with devices that aren’t fully in-spec.

In regards to bandwidth for the external SSD in a dock it is more for having the throughput to move things between the internal SSD to the external SSD and via a versa; not that it is necessarily a need for playing games from it with a docked SteamDeck. You also need the bandwidth and PCIe tunneling support in USB4 or Thunderbolt 3 or 4 for it to do any eGPU. I’m more arguing that if they were to do something like this it should try to balance the potential IO of the internal SSD with the potential IO of an external SSD while also having enough tunneled PCIe lanes to do an eGPU without starving that GPU.

Personally I don’t think that should do a dock to add something like an OClink or whatever eGPU “port”. If a Steam Deck 2 supported USB4 or TB4 they could leave things like that to the 3rd part market.

If anything I think they should make a “pro” dock with a built-in eGPU but I don’t think Valve wants to deal with having multiple performance targets for “Deck Verified”. Hopefully they are working in parallel to automate validation with multiple test variants for new application/game submissions.

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

Originally posted by Sinder:

Great reply!

1. I imagine this would come with a steam deck two, and your right that functionality would have to be built in to a sd2 to be useful. Tbh this is a niche ask anyways.

2. I would support usb c on the front

3. I am not sure you really need that much bandwidth. We are playing pc games off of SD cards, so while I agree that more bw would be welcome, I am not entirely convinced it is necessary. Regardless, this is also a niche ask.

4. Compatibility with established brands as part of the oobe is a standard development practice. The consumer should not have to adjust obscure settings to get the product to work correctly. For this reason I disagree that this is a Samsung problem alone.

It’s a Samsung problem because they are the ones defaulting their TVs to use their “extended compatibility” profile to try to work with trash devices that don’t implement the HDMI standard correctly. Valve making their device to correctly implement the HDMI standard is all that Valve should be doing. That is the entire point of having standards. Valve shouldn’t need to break the standard to work with one brands non-standard “compatibility” profile.

Samsung should make that setting default to off so the TV works with in-spec devices normally, and users would need to enable it to try to work with devices that aren’t fully in-spec.

In regards to bandwidth for the external SSD in a dock it is more for having the throughput to move things between the internal SSD to the external SSD and via a versa; not that it is necessarily a need for playing games from it with a docked SteamDeck. You also need the bandwidth and PCIe tunneling support in USB4 or Thunderbolt 3 or 4 for it to do any eGPU. I’m more arguing that if they were to do something like this it should try to balance the potential IO of the internal SSD with the potential IO of an external SSD while also having enough tunneled PCIe lanes to do an eGPU without starving that GPU.

Personally I don’t think that should do a dock to add something like an OClink or whatever eGPU “port”. If a Steam Deck 2 supported USB4 or TB4 they could leave things like that to the 3rd part market.

If anything I think they should make a “pro” dock with a built-in eGPU but I don’t think Valve wants to deal with having multiple performance targets for “Deck Verified”. Hopefully they are working in parallel to automate validation with multiple test variants for new application/game submissions.

So why then do other docks work perfectly fine?