New drivers significantly improve use under Windows 10 and 11

Unlike previous handheld consoles like Sony’s Playstation Portable or Nintendo’s DS, Valve’s Steam Deck isn’t just a powerful gaming console, but actually a full-fledged PC. Valve itself never tires of emphasizing this in the advertising material, and in fact an NVMe SSD with Windows has already been installed in the Steam Deck. Although Valve explicitly advertises such functionality, the experiences of another operating system on the Steam Deck have so far been expandable.

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Little things like the rotated boot screen and the graphics and processor unit that cannot be read exactly are bearable, but so far there has been a significant problem when using the Steam Deck as a PC. Neither the speakers nor the headphone output on Valve’s console worked with Windows, so sound had to be distributed via USB-C or Bluetooth. Valve has now solved this problem and created a driver made available.

This is a standalone file, but users will also need to update the APU driver for the new audio driver to actually work. With the release of the audio driver, all essential drivers for using Windows 10 and 11 are present on the Steam Deck, but using Windows is still a bit complicated.

SteamOS in its previous versions does not support dual boot, which means that Windows must either be installed on a slower SD card or move in as the only operating system on the console. In addition, due to the missing WLAN driver, a USB-C hub with Ethernet is recommended during installation, which very few users happen to have. With SteamOS 3, however, at least dual-boot support should come, which should further simplify such processes for users.

Source: valves