Valve says Steam Deck should meet Windows 11 requirements

[Daniel Sims]

Highly anticipated: Valve's upcoming Steam Deck handheld should support Windows, but Windows 11's requirement of the TPM 2.0 security feature threw a lot of people for a loop. Valve recently said it's working with AMD to make sure it meets that requirement.

Valve told PC Gamer that it's making sure Steam Deck meets the requirements for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 11 operating system when both launch later this year. This includes the requirement for Trusted Platform Module 2.0, or TPM 2.0, which has had some users worried.

Valve will ship Steam Decks with its own Arch-based SteamOS 3.0, using the Proton compatibility layer to run Windows-only games. However Valve is keeping the device completely open, and won't stop users from installing Windows on it.

This ostensibly means Windows 10, but ever since Microsoft published the system requirements for Windows 11, users have been worried they might be a tad steep. Most concerning has been TPM 2.0, which caused some confusion when Microsoft's compatibility checker told many users it didn't meet that requirement.

PC Gamer asked Valve about this in an interview. "There's work looking at TPM just now," said Steam Deck designer Greg Coomer. "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."

This involves not just Valve but also AMD, the designer of the Steam Deck's Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU. "It's also a conversation that's going on with AMD," Coomer told PC Gamer "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." Just about all of AMD's recent motherboards and CPUs support TPM 2.0 through firmware TPM (fTPM), which can be enabled in the BIOS.

Although Valve is working on Proton to ensure good performance for Windows games that don't natively support SteamOS 3.0, many Steam Deck owners may still want to install Windows 10 or 11 on the device to get native Windows performance. They may also want to install games from PC game launchers that don't support SteamOS (or any version of Linux) at all, like Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, the Epic Games Store, or Blizzard's Battle.net.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/90722-valve-steam-deck-meet-windows-11-requirements.html

 

[Bawlsdeep]

Imagine how great a Hybrid CPU like Alder Lake would have been for this device.
AMD needs one badly.

Handhelds + Laptops are going to explode in terms of batterylife when Hybrid CPU designs take over. ARM-like batterylife with the option to change to performance cores for X86/X86-64 performance as we know it.

 

[Dimitriid]

I kinda like how they're dripping in details one at the time to keep making the news cycle. That's smart.

But maybe they should space them out a bit more? Like 2 or 3 per week just so they can maintain this constant interest in the public eye right up until release.

 

[Lionvibez]

Imagine how great a Hybrid CPU like Alder Lake would have been for this device.
AMD needs one badly.

Handhelds + Laptops are going to explode in terms of batterylife when Hybrid CPU designs take over. ARM-like batterylife with the option to change to performance cores for X86/X86-64 performance as we know it.

No they can wait until Zen 5.

And Alderlake still pushes 228 watts with its big cores so that is a negative! With the Steamdeck being a generation one product we need to see how sales goes and futher development of the product.

 

[Bawlsdeep]

No they can wait until Zen 5.

And Alderlake still pushes 228 watts with its big cores so that is a negative! With the Steamdeck being a generation one product we need to see how sales goes and futher development of the product.

You don't know anything yet, that is from rumours, same rumour that said an Alder Lake chip with 8 performance cores beat Ryzen 5950X in Cinebench Single AND Multi, do you believe that too then?

 

[Lionvibez]

You don't know anything yet, that is from rumours, same rumour that said an Alder Lake chip with 8 performance cores beat Ryzen 5950X in Cinebench Single AND Multi, do you believe that too then?

I believe the power consumption numbers before I believe a twitter post with no Cinebench screenshot

And right now Valve isn't using intel for this product so its all just hear say.

 

[Dimitriid]

I believe the power consumption numbers before I believe a twitter post with no Cinebench screenshot

And right now Valve isn't using intel for this product so its all just hear say.

Actually from what I've seen by Samsung I'd be more interested in getting them onboard for the CPU part with an ARM based one and RDNA 2.0 cores since we know such a Samsung chip is forthcoming anyway.

Truth is ARM has both Intel and AMD beaten for this form factor anyway.

 

[Lionvibez]

Actually from what I've seen by Samsung I'd be more interested in getting them onboard for the CPU part with an ARM based one and RDNA 2.0 cores since we know such a Samsung chip is forthcoming anyway.

Truth is ARM has both Intel and AMD beaten for this form factor anyway.

I would rather take an Zen 4 APU with DDR5 memory on 5nm. TMSC has been doing better than samsung as of late. And I prefer to stay X86 for compatibility issues with games.

 

[Dimitriid]

I would rather take an Zen 4 APU with DDR5 memory on 5nm. TMSC has been doing better than samsung as of late. And I prefer to stay X86 for compatibility issues with games.

The issue isn't the fab, in which case I could defer to you and say sure TMSC is better. The issue is the underlying architecture: ARM is just far more power efficient and scalable than x86 at this point. It's why you don't see x86 phones and even on tablets you rarely see intel ones now that ARM performance overall is getting a lot better.

In fact if we give Valve another 4 or 5 years they might work some more on Proton until they can get close enough to performance parity to just run ARM on Linux with an abstraction layer for x86 Windows games.

I know it sounds insane to think it's possible, but just 6 or 7 years ago the state of gaming on Linux was so bad I most of us wouldn't have believe where we're at right now it just takes a giant like Valve investing in it for things to improve in a hurry and ARM now has Apple also investing a lot of money into performance parity with x86 with already pretty good results so we know it is doable.

 

[Nobina]

I would just love it if Linux became a viable alternative OS for me so that I can ditch Windows.

 

[Red34jfp]

And Alderlake still pushes 228 watts with its big cores so that is a negative!

Looking at the higher end isn't really indicative of how well the design can be scaled down.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

With the direction Microsoft is going Linux couldn't be ready sooner.

 

[Bawlsdeep]

I believe the power consumption numbers before I believe a twitter post with no Cinebench screenshot

And right now Valve isn't using intel for this product so its all just hear say.

You believe what you want to believe it seems

 

[Lionvibez]

You believe what you want to believe it seems

Correct that's how this works.

 

[Redhacker2]

Highly anticipated: Valve's upcoming Steam Deck handheld should support Windows, but Windows 11's requirement of the TPM 2.0 security feature threw a lot of people for a loop. Valve recently said it's working with AMD to make sure it meets that requirement.

Valve told PC Gamer that it's making sure Steam Deck meets the requirements for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 11 operating system when both launch later this year. This includes the requirement for Trusted Platform Module 2.0, or TPM 2.0, which has had some users worried.

Valve will ship Steam Decks with its own Arch-based SteamOS 3.0, using the Proton compatibility layer to run Windows-only games. However Valve is keeping the device completely open, and won't stop users from installing Windows on it.

This ostensibly means Windows 10, but ever since Microsoft published the system requirements for Windows 11, users have been worried they might be a tad steep. Most concerning has been TPM 2.0, which caused some confusion when Microsoft's compatibility checker told many users it didn't meet that requirement.

PC Gamer asked Valve about this in an interview. "There's work looking at TPM just now," said Steam Deck designer Greg Coomer. "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."

This involves not just Valve but also AMD, the designer of the Steam Deck's Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU. "It's also a conversation that's going on with AMD," Coomer told PC Gamer "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." Just about all of AMD's recent motherboards and CPUs support TPM 2.0 through firmware TPM (fTPM), which can be enabled in the BIOS.

Although Valve is working on Proton to ensure good performance for Windows games that don't natively support SteamOS 3.0, many Steam Deck owners may still want to install Windows 10 or 11 on the device to get native Windows performance. They may also want to install games from PC game launchers that don't support SteamOS (or any version of Linux) at all, like Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, the Epic Games Store, or Blizzard's Battle.net.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/90722-valve-steam-deck-meet-windows-11-requirements.html

One of the things I want to end up saying here is you'd probably actually lose performance running windows on this device. The operating system itself will probably eat more of your performance than what the inefficiencies of what proton does. You guys have to remember this is a constrained device it doesn't have a bunch of processing power going untapped. The consistency and lightweightness of Linux suits this device better than windows.