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?
I doubt “soon.” but hopefully this is a step in that direction.
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.
You can already run Steam games on Android, using the same protocol as Valve (FEx) with an app called GameNative.
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.
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.
No, they are building a translation framework for x86
Yes, but they’re making a build specifically for this set. They own all the source code. Presumably that means they made this version native for ARM.
Considering the big rise in ARM PCs it’s completely logical that they start supporting it more too, allowing devs to make and distribute ARM builds.
I’m…not sure what you mean. They’ve just compiled SteamOS and it’s base for arm64. There was nothing stopping that from happening previously. The majority of the client code is closed, and that entire piece of SteamOS is weaved into the OS itself. So they’re just distributing arm64 builds if SteamOS with the client code, not commiting to a standalone client being distributed, unless you’ve seen that somewhere.
No, but it seems like a logical step is all. Allow devs to distribute ARM binaries of their game. Release Steam for ARM.
If they do the work anyhow no sense in wasting it.
I mean…once they have this going, there’s nothing stopping that. It’s essentially the same thing, except the hooks for Mac/Win for the desktop. Linux will already be ready to go. I just haven’t heard them mention it is a point of release is all.
I think they meant the Steam client.
Plus they already said that they would support game binaries built for ARM. Would be stupid not to.
Support meaning in their build system. They’ve already added that as a build option awhile ago. Just means you can set a flag to build for more platforms now, and they have arm64 machine types to handle the builds.
Devs still need to do optimizations to support this in most cases. Some games based on open frameworks won’t have much to do but flip the switch.