Valve is collaborating with AMD to make the Steam Deck compatible with Windows 11

Valve has prioritized Windows support.

Valve hopes to get its Steam Deck mobile gaming PC ready for Windows 11 by the end of the year. While we’ve known for weeks that the Steam Deck can run Windows, it’s unclear how well Valve will support it or whether a Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) option will be enabled to get Windows 11 on the Steam Deck.

Valve has now acknowledged that it has placed a high priority on Windows support. In an interview with PC Gamer, Greg Coomer, a Valve Steam Deck designer, notes, “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.” Coomer added.

Valve is collaborating with AMD to ensure that TPM is supported at the BIOS level and that the Steam Deck is Windows 11 ready. “So there’s nothing to indicate to us yet that there’ll be any issues with Windows 11,” explains Coomer.

That sounds promising for the Steam Deck’s ability to install Windows 11 when it debuts later this year. Valve will support Windows installations on the mobile device, which will launch with SteamOS, a special version of Linux.

So, what’s the point of having Windows on the Steam Deck? Valve is still working on getting anti-cheat games to work out of the box on this device, and titles like Apex Legends, Destiny 2, PUBG, Fortnite, and Gears 5 aren’t guaranteed to work without Windows. “We’re working with BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat to get support for Proton ahead of launch,” says Valve.

The Steam Deck makes use of Valve’s Proton software to run a variety of officially unsupported Windows games, but anti-cheat has been Proton’s main difficulty in recent years. Although Windows support avoids the obvious compatibility difficulties, it will come with an interface that isn’t optimized for a 7-inch screen, as well as a slew of unknowns until we see how well the OS performs on the device.