TL;DR: Valve launched the Steam Frame VR headset with an Arm-based Snapdragon chip, aiming to run Half-Life: Alyx natively and streamed from PC. The new hardware features a “Frame Verified” status for optimized games, while rumors suggest two upcoming Half-Life titles supporting PC and VR cooperative play.
Does this mean steam is soon to distribute ARM Linux native builds?
Would hope so. Maybe that means linux phones will be able to run steam.
What I wouldn’t give for a Valve Phone now that you mention it.
Valve engineers fed up with software, singlehandedly make arch-based handheld, arch-based gaming console, arch-based VR headset, arch-based smartphone, arch-based EV.
How to print infinite money
Just had a funny thought of a tech bro with the Arch based EV, deciding to install Manjaro instead, and breaking their EV after a bad update.
You can already run Steam games on Android, using the same protocol as Valve (FEx) with an app called GameNative.
Not Android, phones based on a desktop Linuc distro (e.g. PostmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch)
GameNative works on Android. Not sure what it uses behind the scenes to run windows software, tho.
Edit: I might’ve misinterpreted what you wrote, oops. Nonetheless, I’ll keep this as it’s still afaik correct info.
probably not, they’ve been building a translation layer called FEX that does x86 -> ARM, reasonable to expect it’s an x86 build optimized for FEX and the hardware specs of the Frame https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
but honestly who knows, they might just release an ARM native build, it’s their own damn game, they were one of the earliest gaming companies to port games originally written for windows to linux, it’s entirely possible they’ll do a full port (am I remembering wrong internet?)
the FEX thing is underrated, I know FEX isn’t new but the news that we can expect to performantly run almost our entire steam catalogue on ARM hardware is wild
Steam Frame is going to have a snapdragon processor and will “be a computer”.
So there will be an ARM native Steam client (and Steam OS that may or may not be SteamOS). Just a question on whether that gets a wider release.
But yes. Games themselves will be heavily dependent on FEX.
Eh, if they’re doing it for Half Life Alyx, it’ll likely work like Proton, where Steam will automatically install a native version if it’s available, and you can “force a compatibility tool” if you’d prefer to run the original version through FEX. Presumably any dev would be able to upload a native ARM version for Steam Frame/a hypothetical Steam Deck 2, but I imagine very few will.
Edit: Valve engineers pretty much confirmed this to Gamer’s Nexus, as they described Steam automatically installing the best version for your device, and that you can manually override that.
Honestly these days the list of things you can’t easily compile natively for ARM is getting pretty scarce. It’s actually kind of surprising to me that there would even be a significant need for an emulation layer, versus just working directly on compiler and runtime support directly.
FEX will have a performance penalty for CPU bound games (not for graphics if it supports Vulkan (yay passthrough)) so native is better
We’ll see ARM Steam before 64bit Steam.
Isn’t 64bit Steam Client due to drop for Windows imminently? They end 32bit support at the start of next year supposedly.
I doubt “soon.” but hopefully this is a step in that direction.