At CES 2025, I saw some of the most exciting developments in the world of handheld gaming PCs that I’ve ever seen, but completely absent from the conversation was Nvidia. It’s a world dominated by AMD with its semi-custom designs like the new Ryzen Z2 range, and one that Intel is slowly working its way into with devices like the MSI Claw 8 AI+. Team Green, by comparison, doesn’t seem interested.
An Nvidia handheld wouldn’t inherently be better than the crop of AMD-powered devices we have now, from the Steam Deck OLED to the new Lenovo Legion Go S, but Nvidia already has features and hardware that fit the ethos of handhelds perfectly. But even with so much going for Nvidia in handhelds, it remains one tough nut to crack.
It’s all coming together
I need to back up first. This year at CES, I saw several new handhelds. There’s the aforementioned Lenovo Legion Go S, of course, but also devices like the massive 11-inch Acer Nitro Blaze 11. These devices didn’t steal the show for handheld enthusiasts, though; instead it was a seemingly small announcement made by Valve.
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Alongside revealing that the Lenovo Legion Go S would be the first handheld officially licensed to use the Steam Deck-exclusive SteamOS, Valve revealed that it would be broadening support for SteamOS in April. Then, Valve says, you’ll be able to install and use SteamOS on any handheld that you want, albeit with a few issues that Valve can’t account for without official licensing. And as our Senior Gaming Editor Giovanni Colantonio will tell you, opening the SteamOS floodgate is a really big deal.
So far, you’ve had to make some sort of compromise with a handheld. You could go with a Steam Deck and get the almost seamless experience of SteamOS, but only with an older, less-powerful AMD chip. Or you could up your power with something like the ROG Ally X, but you’d need to settle for the disjointed handheld experience that Windows 11 provides. Forks of SteamOS like Bazzite are trying to close that gap, but not without a few minor wrinkles.
SteamOS today is significantly more mature than it was a couple of years ago. Proton has continued to improve its compatibility, and the vast majority of Windows games play just fine on the Linux-based SteamOS. One of the biggest hurdles for SteamOS, anti-cheat software, has become less of an issue, too. Although there are still games with anti-cheat that simply won’t work on SteamOS, including Destiny 2 and Apex Legends, the situation with tools like Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye is much better than it was a few years ago. And newer games, like Marvel Rivals, are looking toward alternative anti-cheat solutions in order to bring the game to Linux.
The stars are aligning. Proton is better, anti-cheat isn’t as big of a problem as it once was, there’s a range of new hardware, and SteamOS will be available to the masses in a matter of a few months. But Nvidia is missing the boat.
Why Nvidia?
AMD has done incredible work with devices like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally, and Intel has significantly improved from the original MSI Claw to the new Claw 8 AI+. But Nvidia has a lot to add to handheld gaming PCs with DLSS. It’s no secret that DLSS has been a big driving force behind the popularity of Nvidia graphics cards over the past few generations, and it’s a feature that could completely transform the experience of playing on a handheld.
AMD’s FSR and Intel’s XeSS are solid alternatives to DLSS, but Nvidia’s AI-assisted upscaling and frame generation still take the cake when it comes to overall quality and performance. Upscaling is already a major part of playing on a handheld, so much so that the Steam Deck supported system-wide FSR upscaling from day one. And frame generation is becoming even more important, with FSR 3 enabling playable performance in games like Ghost of Tsushima, and AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames 2 unlocking playable performance in thousands of games with the ROG Ally X.
I don’t need to justify the fact that handhelds would benefit from DLSS, especially with the recent announcement of multi-frame generation in DLSS 4. It would not only help improve performance on handhelds with limited access to computing power, it could also improve battery life. After all, if you don’t have to manually render every pixel and every frame, you can save quite a bit of power.
This is all true of FSR and XeSS, as well. Where DLSS makes the difference is support. XeSS 2 frame generation is only available in a single game at the time of writing, and although FSR 3 is now available in over 75 titles, DLSS 3 is available in close to 150 games. And DLSS Super Resolution is available in over 500 games. As good as the handheld experience is today between AMD hardware and broader SteamOS support, I struggle to believe that the experience with an Nvidia GPU would be worse. There’s a reason that, despite being the center of so much criticism, Nvidia continues to maintain a market share above 80% for desktop graphics cards. It makes a good product, pure and simple.
It seems like the perfect time to unlock that potential. SteamOS has matured to the point that it’s almost seamless to use, and DLSS has some very practical applications in handheld gaming PCs. But there’s a reason we haven’t seen an Nvidia handheld packing SteamOS up to this point, and why we might not see one for quite some time.
Nvidia’s blind spot
You’ve probably seen this video of Linus Torvalds, creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel, giving Nvidia a very public middle finger for its lack of driver support on Linux. There’s a long history here, but Nvidia has maintained a closed-source driver for Linux for many years, while AMD has stuck with open-source, Mesa-based drivers. Ask any Linux player if Nvidia or AMD is better, and they’ll tell you AMD every time. You don’t have to just take my word for that, either.
I caught up with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais at CES, and I wanted to know about how long it would take before I could get SteamOS running on any PC. Before I could even finish the question, he asked me, “what hardware are you running?” He was fishing to see if I was using an Nvidia graphics card — I am — and for good reason. Although the situation with Nvidia hardware on Linux has significantly improved over the past couple of years after the company switched to an open-source code base, that shift has mainly served to fix major bugs and crashes that would show up with Nvidia GPUs on Linux in the past. Griffais made it clear that the experience today with SteamOS and Nvidia hardware wouldn’t be great.
If you need more proof of that, you can look toward Bazzite, which says that “Nvidia GPUs are currently in beta with major caveats.” That bolding is Bazzite, not me. Or you can listen to NerdNest, who just two weeks ago tried to install Bazzite on an Nvidia laptop only to find that it stopped working after a couple of days. If that isn’t enough, here’s Linus Tech Tips showing how SteamOS would fail to even boot with an RTX 3060 GPU, and that video was released just a few days ago.
Griffais tells me that Valve has a dedicated team of engineers working with Nvidia to improve driver support, and it has for years. In fact, Valve has been working with Nvidia on SteamOS drivers for over a decade, but I suspect the bulk of progress has come in the last couple of years with the success of the Steam Deck and the skyrocketed interest in SteamOS.
There’s a classic chicken and egg problem here. Nvidia’s Linux support is still not where it should be compared to AMD and Intel, so it hasn’t built the hardware for a Linux-based gaming handheld. But because that hardware doesn’t exist, and because Linux represents such a small portion of the PC gaming crowd, there’s not much of a hurry to get Nvidia GPUs working perfectly with SteamOS, and by extension, Linux.
There are obvious applications of features like DLSS in a handheld, especially now with multi-frame generation in DLSS 4, but outside of that mold, there are far bigger implications for proper Linux support from Nvidia. As the overwhelmingly dominant supplier of desktop graphics cards, there are a lot of opportunities for SteamOS or forks such as Bazzite to provide console-like gaming experiences to any PC. We won’t see that future until the situation with Nvidia and Linux improves, however.
