News Steam likely coming to Arm chips with support for hundreds of Windows games — Valve testing ARM64 Proton compatibility layer

[Admin]

Valve seems to be working on Proton for ARM64 architecture.

Steam likely coming to Arm chips with support for hundreds of Windows games — Valve testing ARM64 Proton compatibility layer : Read more

 

[ezst036]

Depending on how things shake out, we may eventually end up with a Linux Arm gaming experience that is overall superior to actual Windows for Arm gaming, which would be a real treat for proponents of Linux.

True, having a head start is useful, but realistically it will be short lived.

Microsoft on its own has more paid developers working on the ARM scene than that on the Linux side, and the big time gaming companies will be almost exclusively pouring their money and developer hours into Windows ARM.

It's simple math on the dev hours.

Linux will, however, remain a better gaming environment than Apple Mac. As is true to Apple's history, they rush to the scene, make a bunch of noise and thrash around in the water for a while, but now they seem to have disappeared again.

 

[vanadiel007]

Qualcomm bidding on Intel does not sound so odd anymore...

 

[erazog]

You can already run x86 Steam games on Arm Linux systems (with some hoops to jump through) this just gives an official Arm build of proton likely to be packaged into Steam which will make things easier.

Fedora are considering packaging FEX-Emu into Arm64 builds which would make everything more seamless, if the decision goes through.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 drivers are very far from being useable on Linux, older hardware is better supported for GPU drivers, one of the main devs of FEX-Emu uses the older Snapdragon 8CX hardware as developer platform.

 

[bit_user]

Microsoft on its own has more paid developers working on the ARM scene than that on the Linux side, and the big time gaming companies will be almost exclusively pouring their money and developer hours into Windows ARM.

The two aren't as mutually exclusive as they used to be. Microsoft has been doing a lot to bridge the two worlds. A lot of it is to benefit the performance of Linux apps running inside WSL, so you can run Linux apps on your Windows box with full graphics API support and near native performance. Some of this work involves contributing back other improvements to these Linux software projects.

One thing they recently did, which went the other way, is to adopt SPIR-V as the format of compiled shaders in future Direct3D versions (starting with Shader Model 7).

https://www.phoronix.com/news/DirectX-Adopting-SPIR-V
​

This means you should be able to write and compile shaders using HLSL and use them in Vulkan programs on either OS. They also open sourced their HLSL tools, so you can now build and use them on Linux.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/MS-HLSL-202x-Prep-Compiler
​

It's simple math on the dev hours.

Heh, aside from optimizing GPU performance of WSL apps, Microsoft also has its own Linux distribution that some of its dev hours are going into. I think that's mostly targeted for use in their Azure cloud, but it shows the degree to which Microsoft has embraced Linux.

 

[bit_user]

Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 drivers are very far from being useable on Linux,

Oh, but I'm sure this isn't just aimed at Snapdragon X. There's that Mediatek/Nvidia partnership that should bear fruit next year, and then a rumored AMD ARM-based SoC. Both AMD GPU and Nvidia drivers on Linux are now excellent.

 

[koseke3410]

Looking forward for SteamOS appearing on another platforms, can't wait to ditch my Windows for SteamOS

 

[thestryker]

Oh, but I'm sure this isn't just aimed at Snapdragon X. There's that Mediatek/Nvidia partnership that should bear fruit next year, and then a rumored AMD ARM-based SoC. Both AMD GPU and Nvidia drivers on Linux are now excellent.

Not that this is a direct link but I could see Valve going Arm/AMD for the next Steam Deck if this work pans out well since they don't seem to be in a rush to get a Deck 2 out.

 

[mj-88]

Now, some suggest that this means Valve must be developing its own Arm devices — perhaps an even cheaper alternative to Steam Deck — but truthfully, this seems quite unlikely, particularly considering the already-low entry price of Steam Deck.

Writer assumes Valve actually cares about hardware profits as it has been stated by Gabe that the profit margins are minuscule & sometimes even a loss when on sale but they make up for it via software sales on the platform.
Key strategy here is to get Steam in as many hands as possible, as long as people buy games via steam then Valve wins.

 

[mitch074]

Not that this is a direct link but I could see Valve going Arm/AMD for the next Steam Deck if this work pans out well since they don't seem to be in a rush to get a Deck 2 out.

I'd see this happening only if AMD decided to make an ARM-based APU in the next 6 months. Most of Valve's work on Linux is not Proton (most of its code base comes from Wine, and Wine was already investigating x86 emulation on ARM), but in DXVK (it's part of Proton, but also a standalone project) and in Mesa - compiling Proton for ARM64 and running the binaries in an existing emulator isn't actually too hard. Having a graphics driver that works well, for games, is far more important.
They could, however, support Zink and whatever GPU block with a Vulkan driver one may find on an ARM device - the day that happens, then yes, an ARM-based Steam Deck might be in the cards...
But it's not for right now.

 

[Heizard]

Microsoft on its own has more paid developers working on the ARM scene than that on the Linux side, and the big time gaming companies will be almost exclusively pouring their money and developer hours into Windows ARM.

It's simple math on the dev hours.

Judging past 14 years how Microsoft suffered with Windows Phone and then with Surface devices - their track record with ARM is abysmal. With all their resources they failed.

Recent SnapdragonX laptop release was very similar to that.

So I won't believe in their success until they show it.

But for Linux on ARM this is an actual opportunity, the way Linux advanced on desktop in last 10 years, with huge thanks to Valve including - is just amazing.
I believe Linux will continue it's rapid advancement on desktops.

Year of Linux desktop... soon. 😉

 

[QJ237498]

The writing has been on the wall for quite a while now (and all in plain sight).

Mesa and Asahi Linux (Linux on Apple M1/2/3/4 hardware) developer Alyssa Rosenzweig was hired by Valve more than a year ago and since then she has also been a major contributor to FEX-Emu.

I interpreted that as Steam/Proton coming to MacOS/ARM and/or an ARM-based Steam Deck.

 

[OneMoreUser]

More games on ARM is a good thing, especially if it LINUX based as we need Linux to be a more real alternative for every body. Clearly the current situation with Microsoft and Apple being the only two real options for non techies is terrible and it is only getting worse.