Or rather, Windows 11 will play nice with Steam Deck. The upcoming gaming handheld has stirred up some good feelings in the gaming community ever since launch, and for good reason too.
Steam Deck balances PC power with console convenience.
And does so in style.
But with an array of compatibility issues popping up ever since Microsoft announced its new OS, mostly on the hardware side with stricter system requirements, there has been some confusion about whether Windows 11 will actually run on the new device.
What with the TPM being a necessity, and all.
Luckily, as Valve confirms, the company has not run into any issues during the development of the Steam Deck to suggest that it will not be compatible with Windows 11 at launch. It is, nonetheless, working with AMD to ensure that it is.
In the words of Greg Coomer, Steam Deck designer:
“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.”
Of course, it does not all come down to Valve, as AMD is the creator of the silicon that powers it. The combination of Zen 2 and RDNA 2 APU means that at the fundamental level, the new technology should be ready for the new operating system at the BIOS level.
This should be good news for anyone who wants to replace the SteamOS 3.0 that ships on the Steam Deck with Microsoft’s new operating system.
It may not be the route that everyone will go down, considering just how optimized the native Linux implementation is on the gaming machine and how its UI looks and feels on a handheld machine. But the option is there.
