 Windows on Steam Deck, it's here. On Thursday, Valve released the drivers that we needed to run the operating system that they have spent years trying to make sure we won't need. Linux users have literally begged us not to do this, or at least not to recommend it, but they forgot one simple fact. I own this device, it's mine, so whatever, I do what I want. And besides, even I don't know if I would recommend this yet. What I would recommend is our sponsor, BuildRedux. BuildRedux offers competitive pricing compared to building a PC yourself. Their website makes it easy to configure your build alongside their helpful support guides. So head to buildredux.com slash Linus and start creating your PC today. We will talk about how we got to this point, but I don't wanna keep you guys waiting. And I'm gonna dive right in, starting with desktop controls. You can use either the right joystick or the right track pad to move the mouse cursor around. And I gotta say right out of the gate, having this track pad here compared to something like the JoyX off on the IONIO, pff, wow, is that ever a lot better. But there's one thing I immediately noticed missing. Push to tap. How is that not a thing? No, instead, and this is sort of intuitive, you actually use the right trigger for left click and the left trigger for right click. Pretty much every other handheld I've seen defaults the other way around. Left is left, right is right. But it seems like Valve is of the mind that the dominant hand should be the one that is the most often clicked. Okay, how do I scroll down the page? Oh, it's probably left. Yeah, there we go. Left analog stick. Okay, we just brought up an onscreen keyboard by pushing down on the D-pad. I'm gonna close Steam for now. We can use the touchscreen as well. I guess that's worth mentioning. Oh, wait. No, you need Steam running in order to... Wait, nope. My mouse cursor's back. The right joystick doesn't work for it anymore though. Only the trackpad does. Basically, there's two control schemes. There's the Windows default, which allows you to use this as a trackpad and yeah, it's still right to left and left to right. Or if you have Steam launched, it'll actually treat the entire controller as a Steam controller and you can use the joystick to control the mouse as well. Now that I've got Steam launched again, let's try to launch an application. Okay. Hey, is it? I've seen this on other handhelds as well. For whatever reason, UAC prompts disable whatever software is allowing you to joystick to mouse. On the Steam deck though, at least you can still use the... Okay, I swear. The touchpad worked a second ago. Now it's not working. To be clear, a lot of these annoyances are kind of universal whenever you're trying to use Windows on a handheld device. It's just very imperfect experience. Let's have a look at how this SoC appears in CPU-Z since we've got it. AMD Ryzen, I don't know exactly what card. Custom APU 0405, super cool. Nope, does not know that this is LPDDR5. All right then, how about GPU-Z? Same thing, has no idea what to make of this mess. GPU clock, zero megahertz. Custom APU 0405, fair enough. GPU, custom GPU 0405. Picks up the memory speed at least. It doesn't seem to indicate in any way that this memory is shared between the GPU and CPU, although it does note that 1.2 gigabytes of it is hardware reserved, which would be what's reserved for our GPU. Wi-Fi works, Bluetooth appears to be here. Actually, I should fire up Device Manager. Clearly all the drivers are not working yet. Unknown devices, multimedia controller. Multimedia controller would be the onboard audio. So the three and a half millimeter jack and the speakers do not work. So you can use Bluetooth or you can use a type C to headphone adapter for now. I think we should launch a game. And of course we have a second Steam Deck. I can already tell that this is running like absolute dog poo on Windows compared to Linux. It's not even close. It's not even just that the FPS is lower. It's just a difference in responsiveness and stutteriness. Super unresponsive. It's funny, while I was testing this with the haptics going, I thought that the speaker was going for some reason. Yeah. Because the haptics are so weak. The haptics are, well, there's no haptics. It's just the vibration in the touch pads. Yeah. So they've tuned that in Linux so it doesn't feel so like kind of cheap and ugly sounding. But in Windows, clearly that same tuning hasn't taken place. Well, how about on Windows? What does the Steam button and the overlay button do? Big fat load of nothing. I mean, the Steam button should pull up the Steam overlay or something, but. Oh, oh, it does. It does. It pulls up the Steam overlay which does allow me to exit the game. So it's just the quick access menu button that doesn't do anything. Okay. That's good. Obviously it's a less comprehensive Steam overlay. Let's try something else. I have not played Elden Ring yet. So far launch time looks pretty similar. I started the Windows once lately before. That's a solid Linux win right there. That doesn't look right on the Windows side. No, it really doesn't. When I was testing it earlier, the loading screens are only 16 by nine. So the actual background, like the game assets loading in could be seen in the seams at the top and bottom of the screen. Oh, hilarious. Let's try borderless windowed. I've had better luck with that in some cases. What? Hello? Weird. Oh. Oh, hey. Hey, we're back. Time to not mess with that again. I'm loading up a new game here because we did all the benchmarking on this Steam account where we're actually a little bit into the game, but I wanted to be able to play them side by side with you guys. So we got a new account for the Linux machine and we wanted to be able to just switch back and forth between them. Okay. Wow. Big picture has work to do. I mean, Valve has said that they're going to adapt big picture based on the Steam OS Steam Deck interface. Like this. Oh man. Night and day, so much better. There it is. You can see the seams. Oh, that's weird. This is a famously bad port. Linux for the win for loading times again. Wow, is Windows really that far behind? Oh shoot, I didn't open frame view. This is another thing that I'm not expecting to be a great experience on the Steam Deck. Other handhelds have a button to minimize the game and jump to the desktop. I suspect Valve has integrated no such functionality. I mean, I don't need frame view to tell me that's terrible. I've read about hitches and stutters in this game, but this is unbelievable. Valve apparently used the fact that they are translating DirectX to Vulkan to implement a pre-shader compilation routine that prevents it from starting. The crazy thing about Windows though, is that this isn't even behaving like on the fly shader compiling. Like it should stop doing it. It should. After I do a full rotation. But it doesn't. And so the fact that we're running this translation layer actually results in better smoothness. I think it's time for us to stop the side by side comparison and get into the empirical data then. We ran benchmarks on three great on-deck games and Linux users can breathe a sigh of relief because SteamOS handily outperformed Windows, particularly in Hitman 3 where SteamOS gives playable if inconsistent frame rates, while Windows averages a painful 19 FPS. Doom Eternal hit a 60 FPS average on SteamOS while Windows was stuck in the high 40s. And Elden Ring famously far more playable on-deck than on Windows pulls ahead in terms of frame rate. And as you guys saw, didn't suffer from the same stuttering that the PC port has treated Windows gamers to. Our Swackets don't suffer either by the way, lttstore.com. But what about controls outside of Steam? We already saw that launching Steam takes over the deck's controller. Can we do the same and say an emulator? What emulators did you put on here? I just put on RetroArch. Oh crap. I don't have screen cap. It did this in testing too. For whatever reason, RetroArch, what you're seeing on your screen is not what I'm seeing on this screen. This screen shows the desktop. Oh, beautiful. Oh my God. Come on RetroArch. I just, I mean, this could be a Steam controller issue. How do I go back if my controller is not allowing me to go back? Wait, oh, and this is off now. Wait, what? Back, instead of going back, negatively toggles a setting and then confirm activates a setting. That is the strangest behavior I think I've ever seen out of a controller ever. Is Steam still running? Yes. That might be the problem. I don't even know if I'm gonna be able to close this software. There's no task manager button or control alt delete button, like you would see on a Windows optimized handheld. That's the kind of thing that you could probably bind. I mean, the Steam controller is infinitely customizable. It's one of the best things about it. But Anthony, I don't think I can close RetroArch because I can't go back. This is crazy. X and Y will sometimes go down, are up and down multiple items in the menu and sometimes just one. See here, it does just one. What is happening? Oh, you activated the onscreen keyboard. I did? Yes, you can't see it, but I can. Unless there's an escape key on that. No, I don't think- Press again to quit. Yes. Full disclosure, I expected that to happen. Oh, thanks Anthony. Well, this is just as bad. Back doesn't go back. How do I go back? B is trying to close RetroArch. The default control scheme in Windows without Steam running for the Steam deck is that that key is escape. So is that a Valve issue or is that a Windows issue? That would be a Valve's controller mapping issue. Now, normally that makes sense for navigating Windows because the up and down arrows are just the, just like the D-pad is the up and down arrows, left and right. So you can navigate everything with the buttons pretty well. That's probably why we have an Xbox controller here. Right. Because now B is back because it's picked up as a controller, not as a Windows pointer device. Yeah, so I think RetroArch is gonna have to add a controller definition file or something to hook into it, like they do with the Steam deck and with the Xbox 360 controller and Xbox One. Well, will the game work? The game should work. Okay, let's try the game then at least. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. What? It doesn't work. Even in game, it's still in. Oh man. All right, well, I still wanna know about the latency. I mean, I guess it'll be fine. It's just Windows. I mean, it should be. Yeah, I mean, this feels great. Mostly I just wanted to show off the fact that the controls are hot garbage and broken. Yes. Got it. So better use Steam. Yeah, pretty much. Oh no, not charging, Chuck. I wanna get up there. Oh, balls. And there are a lot of other things to keep in mind if you wanna run Windows on deck. For one, you're not able to dual boot SteamOS and Windows until Valve releases the final SteamOS installer with support for this baked in. I already mentioned there isn't an audio driver for the speakers or the three and a half millimeter headphone jack yet, but audio via USB-C or Bluetooth does work. Apparently a driver will be coming for that sooner rather than later. What we don't have an ETA for is things like the brightness slider fix. Okay, it works fine sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't respond to the full drag. Yeah, so you need to kind of like drag it back and forth towards the end that you wanna go to. So if you wanna get it brighter, you need to go to max and drag it back and forth. If you wanna go darker, you need to drag it back and forth. I think if you go slow, it's fine. So it might be an acceleration issue with the touch to mouse input detection or whatever. I don't know the proper technical terms for it, but it seems to be that if you go fast, it doesn't make it the whole way, which could be a touchscreen responsiveness issue in Windows. I'm sure it's fixable, but we don't know when or if that will ever be fixed. And there's also the much larger problem where the deck doesn't like to come out of sleep in Windows. Either it takes forever or never wakes up. So you'll wanna disable sleep, unless you're into hard powering off in order to get back into Windows, but that's not a great experience for a handheld device. What's more, when you go to actually install Windows, you're gonna notice that the display is rotated 90 degrees. That's actually pretty common for devices like this because they often use panels that were designed originally for tablets. It just means that until you get to the Windows desktop, you're gonna have to deal with that. You won't have any Wi-Fi, so you'll have to install without a product key if you don't have a type C ethernet dongle. And speaking of, you're probably gonna want a type C to USB-A adapter, or ideally a multi-port dongle like this one, so that you can plug in a USB flash drive and a keyboard and mouse. It can be done without, but it's definitely not as seamless. All of which raises the big question here. Why would anyone want to run Windows on the Steam Deck? Well, I can think of a few reasons, even ignoring familiarity with the interface and the apps. Access to Xbox services comes to mind. While alternative launchers and storefronts for Epic Games Store and GOG are available on Linux, Xbox still isn't, and that means there are some games that you simply cannot play on Steam OS right now, even ignoring anti-cheat problems. And you're certainly not gonna get access to Game Pass unless you're streaming from a Windows device or from Microsoft's own servers. I've also personally run into some very frustrating bugs while gaming on the Deck. I just completed a run through of Horizon Zero Dawn, start to finish on my personal Deck, and I saw everything from drops down to one FPS for extended periods. Like I'm talking 10, 30 seconds at a time, to hard game crashes back to the Steam interface, to even black screens that necessitated a full system shutdown. This raises serious questions for me about the thoroughness of Valve's game verification program. Horizon Zero Dawn is a great on-deck game, but my experience was anything but great. And I sincerely doubt that if Sony had actually been involved in this certification process, they would have signed off on it being advertised as great on-deck. In fact, there's a great blog post on gaming on Linux from the lead developer of F-Audio, which is a core component of Proton, the compatibility layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux, criticizing Valve's collaboration, or lack thereof, with third-party developers. So if Valve is just yoloing it, what's the process? There are only so many hours in a day, and Valve seems to be validating a lot of freaking games. Based on my experience with Horizon Zero Dawn, what I suspect they're doing is they're just firing up the game, playing early areas, which in many games tend not to be as demanding, and going, yep, seems good, rubber stamp. And I actually didn't have any issues in the first five hours of my playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn, but by the end, I was getting crashing or stuttering about every 30 minutes or so. Not a great experience. Other than that, though, SteamOS is objectively the much more polished experience. The quick access menu with its convenient diagnostics and controls is conspicuously absent from Windows, and even basic functionality like charging still seems to have issues in Windows. We actually observed our Steam Deck discharging while plugged in, which is something that I have never seen running SteamOS. So Valve is allowing users to run Windows, even facilitating it by providing drivers and public help docs. Good guy Valve, 100%, and we're gonna have those linked down below if you wanna do it yourself. But the roughness of the experience does make me wonder, are they ever going to put in the effort that it would take to make it as smooth as SteamOS? My gut feeling is no, which makes me wonder how much of the performance difference we saw is down to a lack of optimization. I mean, theoretically, the same hardware should perform very similarly across Windows and Linux, and this, our results were not even close. Now, admittedly, that could be as much AMD's fault as Valve's, and the Steam Deck also features a very unusual architecture for a Windows machine, with the CPU and GPU cores sharing common memory. I'm sure SteamOS, on the other hand, was carefully tuned to account for this. I just feel like there was a lot of Windows performance left on the table here, and our investigation today has left us with more questions than answers. The one answer we have right now, though, is that we wouldn't recommend Windows on the Steam Deck, at least not in its current state. So if your must-have games don't work in SteamOS, you might just have to pony up for a competing handheld. That is, at least until Valve makes dual booting possible, which is something we're planning to explore, along with a two terabyte internal storage upgrade to the deck, so make sure you are subscribed for that. And make sure you're subscribed to hear about our sponsor, dbrand. The robots at dbrand drove a truck of money to our office to push their new Project Kill Switch on pretty much every Steam Deck video that we have. What's Project Kill Switch? Well, it's a project to kill the Switch, I think. Basically, it's similar to their grip cases for phones and other devices, but for your Steam Deck. It's got a rugged, rubberized finish, plus a kickstand for when you're gaming on the go, but you wanna pull out a controller. They've also got their tempered glass screen protector for the Steam Deck, which we tested out for them. Turns out, regular tempered glass inhibits touch sensitivity, but dbrand screen protectors are super precise and guaranteed to work on your display. So why wait? You can reserve Project's Kill Switch now at dbrand.com slash kill switch, or at the link down below. Thanks for watching, guys. Go check out our initial review of the Steam Deck for more decky goodness. It still blows my mind that they managed to ship these things, especially for this price.