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
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your pc today we will talk about how we got to this point but i don't want to
keep you guys waiting and i'm going to dive right in starting with desktop
controls you can use either the right joystick or the right trackpad 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 joy x off on the ineo
wow is that ever a lot better but there's one thing i immediately notice
missing push to tab
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 though it's probably left yeah there we go left analog stick
oh okay we just brought up an on-screen 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 seam 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 is 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
a very imperfect experience let's have a look at how this soc appears in CPU-z
since we've got it AMD ryzen we don't know exactly what kind custom
apu-045 super cool nope does not know
that this is lpddr5 all right then how about gpuz
same thing has no idea what to make of this mess GPU clock zero megahertz
custom apu0405 fair enough GPU custom GPU 405. 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 uh
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 like 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 that's that's good
obviously it's a less comprehensive steam overlay let's try something else i
have not played elven 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 it really doesn't when i was testing it earlier the loading screens
are only 16x9 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 ca
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 vulcan 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 steam os handily
outperformed Windows particularly in hitman 3 where steam os gives playable
if inconsistent frame rates while Windows averages a painful 19 FPS due
maternal hit a 60 FPS average on steemos while Windows was stuck in the high 40s
and eldon 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 in say an emulator uh
what emulator should 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's 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 the setting that is the strangest behavior i think i've ever
seen out of a controller ever is steam still running uh yes that might be
the problem i don't even know if i'm going to 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 our 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 on-screen 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 president 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 yeah the d-pad is the up and down arrows left and right
so you can navigate everything with the buttons pretty well 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 going to
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
what it doesn't work even in game it's still in oh man all right well i still
want to know about the latency i mean i guess it'll be fine it's just
Windows i mean it should be
oh 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 oh i want to get up there
oh balls and there are a lot of other
things to keep in mind if you want to run Windows on deck for one you're not
able to dual boot steam os 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 3.5 millimeter headphone jack yet but audio
via usbc 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 want to go to so if you want to get it brighter you need to go to max and drag
it back and forth you want to go darker you need to i think if it goes slow it's
fine so it might be an acceleration
issue with the uh like 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 touch screen
responsiveness issue in Windows i 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 want
to 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 going to 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 going to
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 going to 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 game store and gog are
available on Linux xbox still isn't and
that means there are some games that you simply cannot play on steamos right now
even ignoring anti-cheat problems and you're certainly not going to 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 1 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 yellowing 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 steam os
so valve is allowing users to run Windows
even facilitating it by providing drivers and public help dogs good guy
valve 100 and we're going to have those linked down below if you want to 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 steam os
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 valves and the steam deck also
features a very unusual architecture for a Windows machine with the CPU and GPU
course 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 steam os 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 2
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
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a rugged rubberized finish plus a kickstand for when you're gaming on the
go but you want to pull out a controller they've also got their tempered glass
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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 they managed to ship these
things especially for this price