Valve has made some big promises with its new Steam Deck handheld console. One of them is that by the time the device is shipped, every Steam game will work on the handheld out of the box, without any modifications to the software or OS. To fulfill this goal, Valve’s software team is working around the clock to ensure that the Proton emulator (which allows Windows games to run on SteamOS) is all set and ready by the time gamers get the first Deck consoles.
However, this doesn’t mean that the company is forcing anyone to stick to SteamOS. Users will be free to switch to Windows or Linux if Valve’s OS doesn’t meet their fancy. The team has even confirmed to PCGamer that while Windows 10 is fully compatible, they should be able to make the Deck work with Windows 11 by the time it launches later this year.
There’s work looking at TPM just now. We’ve focused so much on Windows 10, so far, that we haven’t really gotten that far into it. Our expectation is that we can meet that.
It’s also a conversation that’s going on with AMD, to make sure that, at the BIOS level, we can accommodate that. So there’s nothing to indicate to us yet that there’ll be any issues with Windows 11.
Greg Coomer, Valve Steam Deck designer to PC Gamer (Via: EC)
Microsoft upset a lot of people with its rather high hardware requirements for Windows 11. The new OS officially supports only AMD’s Zen+ and Intel 8th Gen processors and above. At the very minimum, you need a 1GHz dual-core processor with 4GB of memory, and of course, TPM 2.0 which although present on most modern boards tends to be disabled.
The fact that Valve is working with AMD to make sure that the custom Zen2/RDNA 2 SoC is compatible with Windows 11 bodes well. Considering that the chip is based on the same architecture as the Ryzen 3000 processors, it should have no issues running Windows 11. The rest, we’ll just have to wait and see.
