Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.
The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there.
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with their new hardware in 2026.
Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.
From interviews with the Alyx devs, it really sounded like the only reason they didn't call it HL3 was fear of not living up to the name.
Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to lead the HL3 project."
That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).
pretty sure they don't have a totally flat org structure anymore but I might be wrong
Valve recently said outright that they have no VR titles in development.
https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...
Seems unlikely with the steam machine coming? I haven't heard any sign of it specifically being frame only
Imagine HL3, Portal 3 et L4D3 but all linux only. oh my
Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).
A killer app is a great way to sell a "console". Windows port can come later.
Doubt it, considering Deadlock still only has Windows builds a year into alpha.
Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under him valve is such a consumer focused company
When I read what you wrote, I immediately asked myself "Doesn't Gabe have children who could have been raised with the same values? Maybe that..." and then I caught myself thinking exactly the same way as many others before me, and the reason why we have so many shitty politicians in positions of power today.
I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
Corporate structure and tools to be used in combination with social controls (i.e. culture) by the true believers can do the job.
Just musing along with you here but I think it's really hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe. But there will be other companies that end up with a similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best we can.
I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.
And Valve has been deeply rewarded as a result. The stance that you must abuse customers to maximize economic success will be looked back upon as the stupidity it is.
From what Ive read his son is pretty actively involved day to day already at valve.
To be fair, without the HL3 memes, would Valve ever become as massive as they are now without them constantly teasing and playing into it?
(answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st century).
half life releases were tied to new platforms, such as HL2 and its physics engine, or HL Alex and VR kits.
it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc.
there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future.
Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.
It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translation layers rather than signed blobs.
These things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely a remote control system that they can send instructions to look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer, MITM, emulation, and even now AI mouse control.
The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is great for seeing those in action as well!)
That sounds like it does prevent cheating? But maybe doesn’t prevent ALL cheats. Or do you mean they work so poorly that it doesn’t make any difference at all?
I mean it works by someone saying look for DotaCheat4.exe and it searches for it. That’s basically it. Also if your engine has the ability to be hooked into (ahem, gta) it will detect that a process has been attached. It may do some memory scanning if they implemented the allocator from the sdk. What I’m saying is, it’s a crap shoot out there whether the devs did or not. Executives use it as a blanket as to not get sued. “We have anti-cheat”. They can claim it was “circumvented” or whatever. They are all garbage. BattleEye, EasyAntiCheat, Vanguard. If you don’t know, here LL giving a run down.
Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
Other options exist but it’s not an option for these real-time games like FPS’s. I get it.
If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security.
You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far.
But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
> But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.
> These things do not prevent cheating at all.
Yes they do. They don't stop all cheating, but they raise the barrier to entry which means fewer cheaters.
I don't like arguments that sound like "well you can't stop all crime so you may as well not even try"
Ok, they prevent known cheats that the company has found online behind some subscription site run in the basement in Jersey. True. They do raise the bar, but they aren’t the barrier.
Anti-cheat is a misnomer; it's much more about detecting cheats more than it is preventing them. For people who are familiar with how modern anti-cheat systems work, actually cheating is really the easy part; trying to remain undetected is the challenge.
Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with, which to be fair was circa 2016, it is still possible to work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of being much harder to detect obviously.)
The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to detect cheats.
For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a limited shelf life anyways.
Anticheat devs could REALLY benefit by having some data scientists involved.
Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.
Is it ever? No.
Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would be able to make a great set of rules using statistical analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level beyond human.
In the chess of fps that is cs, even a pro will make the wrong read based on their teams limited info of the game state. A random wallhacker making perfect reads with limited info over several matches IS flaggable...if you can capture and process the data and compare it to (mostly) legitimate player data.
"Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban."
Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a shooter, that you can spot it in game data reliable to apply automatic bans?
Tomorrow the cheats will be back with human looking reaction speeds and inhuman decision making that is indistinguishable from expert players.
Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's happening!
I don't hate the lack of cheating compared to older Battlefield games if I am going to be honest.
Lack of cheating in BF6?
Afaik there have been wallhacks and aimbots since the open beta.
> Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's happening!
I'm curious, does anyone know how exactly they check for this? How was it actually made unspoofable?
They also require TPM, which I think facilitates remote attestation that secure boot is really enabled.
Arc Raiders is a great example of a modern and popular multiplayer game that works with proton. I haven't heard about it having a problem with cheating.
> though not all developers elect to enable it.
Looking at you Rust.
Edit:
And the rest of you. If even Microsoft's Masterchief Collection supports it, I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
First i thought you meant the video game Rust.
Then I saw the arewe…yet url and thought you meant Rust the programming language
Then I visited the arewe…yet link and realized it was the Rust game you meant after all
I know what you mean, sometimes I google Rust specific things (the coding language) and get Rust the game.
/r/rust, the subreddit for the Rust language, regularly (every 1-2 days at most) gets posts meant for /r/playrust, the subreddit for the Rust game. I genuinely don't know how people manage to get as far as posting without noticing where they are.
It’s probably because the “create a Reddit post” form doesn’t require you to even visit the subreddit you are posting to. It DOES show you the rules/sidebar of the subreddit you are about to post to (for /r/rust it includes a link to /r/playrust for the gamers) but apparently many aren’t seeing that.
It is hard to perceive that which you are not aware exists even with obvious evidence in your face
For awhile googling “Swift” was like that with Taylor Swift results instead of the programming language.
Likely a case where Google figured out which one you meant through the telemetry of what you clicked on and how you refined your search, now that personalization is automatic. In my case, I get four regular results, which are the financial standard, the programming language, the wikipedia page for the programming language, and an ISP; then I get a "top stories" block that is all about the singer.
More tricky for the sibling comment with Rust, where either one could be valid.
as a person that plays rust and writes rust I feel this all the time
> I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
It's because the Linux versions of those anti-cheats are significantly weaker than their Windows counterparts.
It's telling that Valve uses a user space anti-cheat (VAC) for Counter-Strike 2, but the competitive community overwhelmingly rejects that and ops to use a third-party Windows-only kernel mode anti-cheat (FACEIT).
I think even the "Major" tournaments that are officially sanctioned and sponsored by Valve, though organized by third parties, usually run on FACEIT or similar.
Eh, some employers also have root for your work PC, that’s different from asking to install a rootkit on your personal PC.
Would love to see it on MacOS X -- Steam works great on my Mac Mini for the games it supports, would be great to see everything run on it.
Yep. I know Apple has little motivation to support such a project but it would be great to see them work with Valve on this. Having the majority of Steam games "just work" on modern Macs, like they do on the Steam Deck, would be fantastic.
Apple top leadership cares more about "games on the Mac App Store built on a Mac for Metal" than it cares about "games on the Mac". This won't change until leadership changes.
Apple already made it, it's just that it targets developers rather than end users: https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
I think it's more than "little motivation" if we're being honest. Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably) cut them out. Their very clever approach has been a full end-run around the OS by using Proton, which I'm sure genuinely thrilled Apple... as long as Valve is only doing that to MS.
Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
Especially looking at Apples recent gaming history.
When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam, etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can get their 30% cut.
I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
App stores for desktop computers have pretty consistently failed except for Steam.
I don't think I've installed anything from the App store on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of images into my Applications folder.
The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do almost anything I need to do with developers but I can't touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all sorts of things for work and just install them the way we did before there was Windows 8.
In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I really wanted from it was the application to use my scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious that it was possible to rebuild that database because it got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring all the applications that I actually use just so I can use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have their own installer/updater that works like a normal Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2 works and it does.
Microsoft dreams that you might buy games from the Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you know it would just force them to write off the Activision acquisition earlier rather than later.
Apples biggest weakness is games. But it has a pretty large install base when compared to Linux (not counting phones or servers here).Seems like a win/win. Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or at the very least distract from their main focus.
> Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing their weaknesses, especially a solution as competent and well-funded as Steam.
If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents them from expanding to iPhones and tablets in the EU, and possibly elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched?
Games are not a weakness for Apple. They have all the gaming revenue they seem to care about with mobile. They just don't have proper/immediate motivation to apply that effort to desktop. I'm not sure i even care anymore. I'm a valve fanboi at this point, until Gabe leaves and they go corporate.
> Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform; edge cases, at best
mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
Yes, that is what I was alluding to.
But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who might buy a Mac.
Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game revenue, I don’t think they have that much to lose.
Main issue is the lack of Vulkan support on macOS. Currently, solutions like MoltenVK have to be developed to add Vulkan support, which isn't as clean as just supporting it.
For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.
Unfortunately, this will not happen. Even if they have it all working:
Above all, Apple wants to show that their hardware is awesome, especially because it really is. Running x86 games or compatibility layers even with great emulation will make that $3000 Mac look half decent at best, against a $1500 gaming laptop. Simply not the story Apple want to tell.
If apple wanted to show that they have good hardware they wouldn't gimp the iPad pro with iOS. They really don't care.
Currently, someone interested in an iPad and needing the power of a MB, will have to buy both.
If they stopped restricting the iPad, those people would only have to buy an iPad.
And as someone without a single interest in an iPad, I would worry that removing the iPad limitations would increase its market-share and lead to Apple reducing even more their interest in the MB, which would be terrible news to me.
Are you looking for Crossover? It's a bit annoying to not run Steam natively (no cmd+H to hide, etc) but it's got a lot of support. Performance is decent on my M2 mini, and even cross-platform stuff like Baldurs Gate 3 is comparable performance to native.
Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of 32bit support has good support.
Sadly, that's not true—for instance, I was trying to run the Shadowrun Returns series the other day, and while it launches, it will hang indefinitely when you try to actually start a game. (M4 Max)
I previously played through Returns, Dragonfall, and part of Hong Kong on Mac before the 32bit-apocalypse.
It would be neat if Valve would fund having Steam Client run on Apple Silicon without Rosetta 2 so arm games like Baldur's Gate 3 can be fully supported.
I'm not sure what FEX could offer on macOS that Rosetta 2 doesn't already, with better performance thanks to Apple Silicon magic.
Running x86 code on ARM macOS is the most solved part of the stack, if anything needs work it's the API translation layers.
Aren’t most Mac issues now around Metal vs OpenGL and DirectX?
Rosetta 2 is going to be EOL'd within the next few years. A more permanent solution would certainly be welcome.
AIUI they intend to retire support for x86 macOS apps in a few years, but Rosetta will remain as a low-level component so that things like Crossover and Parallels can continue to work. Maybe not forever, but there's no immediate threat of it being EOL'ed.
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/10/apple-to-phase-out-rose...
Yeah, that's not very reassuring.
You guys remember when you bought a computer and could run the software you wanted, independent of political motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to provide high-quality long term support only works if Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings that still run 32-bit libraries, run CUDA drivers and other things Apple arbitrarily flipped the switch on.
i’m not sure how end-of-life it will actually be because rosetta is used in apple/container and seems to be a large part of the virtualization stuff apple’s built in the last few years
I would imagine they would disable the user-facing "load x86_64 Mach-O's seamlessly" and other loader magic, and keep around the core for such things.
The last time I can remember a collaboration between Valve and Apple was for the SteamVR support on macOS back in 2016. Sadly it fell apart a year(-ish) after that. But… one can dream!
Are you expecting to run Windows 11 ARM version on your Mac Mini directly, or within Parallels?
I think it's a pretty reasonable wish for more macOS + Apple Silicon support of games, including more native FEX & Proton ARM support within the steam client. (We're lucky Steam works, it's a better games client than the Mac App Store dreams to be, but that's also not saying much either.)
Apple Silicon has no UEFI support except as provided by Asahi, so that would be needed at a minimum to boot Windows 11 natively. Then there's the whole issue of having native Windows drivers for the Apple Silicon-specific hardware.
You’d run FEX with WINE/Proton, no windows needed. If you did use a VM, I’d think it would be a Linux VM. But, Linux VM on macOS could already use Apple’s Rosetta2 for x86_64-to-arm64 translation.
Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with Apple’s WINE “game porting toolkit” direct with Rosetta2. Worth a Google.
EDIT: indeed, you can already play x86 windows games on Mac using software written by Apple: https://gist.github.com/Frityet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae...
I think they're wishing for something like the Proton/Fex combination for running x86 Windows games on ARM Macs, like they already do for Linux.
I wonder if Apple's GPT (Game Porting Toolkit) could added to the macOS Steam client as a compatibility tool, like Proton is in the Linux client.
Apple's GPTK only supports D3D12 -> Metal. In addition, it's ambiguous if 3rd parties can distribute the D3DMetal dylib, as there's no license.
GPTK is mostly a bunch of developer tools for converting to Metal, and the closest it gets to anything like Proton is an "evaluation environment" that is nothing close to Proton's performance. Proton is mostly Wine, and Wine on macOS uses MoltenVK, so it's probably easier to just port Proton.
Any leads on when the next generation of Steam Deck will be released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it will be more like 2026.
Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.
As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-factor devices:
* Lenovo Legion Go S
* Asus ROG Ally
But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how good or bad they really are.
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-handheld-gaming-devices
It won't be for a while, since Valve is releasing the Steam Machine next year and has commented that they are waiting until they can build a Steam Deck successor that is significantly better than the original.[1] My guess is 2027.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
I would assume Steam Deck 2 isn't dropping before at least H2 2026, if not later, if they didn't bring it out with the announcement of the other devices.
Valve's only official statement as far as I know is that it will come when they see a significant enough hardware upgrade to warrant a new system. If they don't move to ARM, AMD's Medusa APUs are their next architecture with major upgrades, so I would guess that Valve would order another custom AMD chip but based on Medusa, which won't release until at least 2027. I would guess at least H2 2027 but probably early 2028 for an AMD-based Steam Deck 2.
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't. Valve don't want to sell hardware, they want to sell games. They only make hardware as flagships for new markets, then they want other hardware manufacturers to take over.
the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam deck
They definitely are working on it. They announced the steam machine, steam controller, and the valve frame (standalone vr headset with seamless screen sharing from a PC), and in their reveal video the first thing they rather coyly say is “we’d love to share information about our next Steam deck, but that’s for another day!” and announce a bunch of other cool stuff.
No earlier than 2027, it's valve you're talking about, they don't need to rush
Valve has said they want at least double the capabilities, while still fitting in a similar power envelope. Unsaid is that it also needs to fit in the same price budget, but I tend to believe that's their intent. It's gonna be a while. Valve got a stellar deal on some somewhat unusual Zen2 APUs, orginally built for Magic Leap; finding a similar good deal is going to take time. I sort of hope Valve isnt going to put out a $1600 Halo system (but probably would buy such a next-gen Gorgon Halo system). Maybe Gorgon Point is good enough for them, in which case yeah 2026H2 is reasonable.
Are you aware that the year is 2025, and that it is 92.2% over? There is next to no chance of a Deck2 this year. I would really really not hold my breath for 2026 either.
Link could be changed to the source: https://www.theverge.com/report/820656/valve-interview-arm-g...
Which was posted a day ago but no activity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126446
But that is paywalled
Oh - I'm not seeing any paywall.
Nope...
Verge has a dynamic paywall - so it depends on how many articles you’ve read.
For those having issues, open in private mode I guess.
I've never been paywalled with The Verge.
kinda funny that Microsoft has tried and failed multiple times to make Windows on ARM work
and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's detriment
A funny detail is that Microsoft's mostly fruitless ARM efforts unintentionally ended up being a boon for Valves ARM effort. From MSVC 2019 they started augmenting x86 binaries with undocumented metadata specifically to assist the Windows x86-on-ARM emulator, but then the FEX team figured out how that works and implemented it in their emulator too, greatly increasing the performance of most recent Windows games on ARM Linux.
I think the problem is that, until recently, there was little impetus to actually run Windows on devices where ARM actually has a meaningful advantage over x86. The Windows ARM laptops out there today don't impress, not just because of the software, but because the hardware itself isn't "better enough" than Intel or AMD to justify the transition for most people the way Apple Silicon was, especially for games. That is to say nothing of desktops, where battery life isn't even a concern.
Valve is using ARM to run Windows games on "ultra portable" devices, starting with the Steam Frame. At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip that fits this use case. It also feels like more of an experiment, as Valve themselves are setting the expectation that this is a "streaming first" headset for running games on your desktop, and they've even said not to expect a great experience playing Half-Life: Alyx locally (a nearly 7 year old title).
It will be interesting to see if Intel/AMD catch up to ARM on efficiency in time to keep handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally from jumping ship. Right now it seems Valve is hedging their bets.
It may have taken them a while, but it does now work fine.
Define 'fine'
You don't notice you're on ARM at all. Everything "Just Works."
And you're seeing 20+ hours battery under normal workloads (i.e. not spec sheet "20 hours" but day-to-day). I've been mainlining a Windows ARM laptop for six months, and am yet to run into anything I couldn't do.
I run WoA on my daily work laptop and everything I run other than some of the junky IT-pushed apps (outlook extension to report phishing, etc.) are ARM64-native and run as expected.
It turns out the best API for gaming on Linux and gaming on ARM was Win32 and x86_64. Who knew?
Well, compiling ARM game binaries is actually super duper easy and just totally fine. The issue Windows actually has with ARM is GPU drivers for the ARM SoCs. Qualcomm graphics drivers are just super slow and unreliable and bad. ARM CPU w AMD GPU is easy mode.
Shows how a stable API will beat the hell out of bleeding-edge improvements every time.
That's an especially hostile website for uMatrix users. It pops up a modal dialog if Javascript is allowed from the main domain, but blocked from any other domain.
Can someone tell me how much more power efficient is ARM actually? Like under load when gaming, not in a phone that sleeps most of the time. I've heard both claims, that it's still a huge difference and that for new AMD Zen it's basically the same.
It's workload-dependent. On-paper, ARM is more power-efficient at idle and simple ops, but slows down dramatically when trying to translate/compose SIMD instructions.
Does anyone know what the limfac is? The machine code produced is of course different on different CPU arches, but isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about.
The exception I see is if SIMD intrinsics.
This system allows playing unmodified production x86 executables on arm64. It doesn’t have anything to do with the developers.
That's great, but begs the question: why not just compile the games for ARM?
Because this works for the enormous back catalog of games that already exist, many of which I bet companies no longer have the code or a working build system for, and for new games it doesn't require the developers to do anything because many (most?) of them wouldn't bother
They may provide an option for developers to distribute a native ARM build (which some are already building for Quest titles that can be brought over to Steam Frame) but one of Steam's main advantages is their massive x86 games catalog so they certainly don't want to require that
You need to convince all developers that all 117,881 Steam games need be recompiled for ARM. Hopefully they have a working build environment, have appropriate libraries built for ARM, still have the source code, and are able to do the testing to see if the same code works correctly on ARM.
...because there are thousands upon thousands of games that will never be compiled for ARM?
Just look at all the "native macOS" games from the 2010s that are completely unplayable on modern Macs. Then look at all the Windows games from the 1990s that are still playable today. That's why.
Yooo this is awesome, maybe we will finally get some game support on Macs now
Doubtful, the article is about FEX-emu and Apple has only shown interest in native ports of games to their platform.
Plus, it looks like upstream FEX doesn't play very nice with Apple Silicon in the first place.
Given how arm license is know to be less than friendly.... Wouldn't it be preferable to explore a RISCV architecture.
As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.
Have we seen a commercially available high performance 64-bit RISCV chip at production scale yet?
There’s a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term for what’s not an obvious product benefit.
I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a company like Valve dives in.
>at production scale
You can even omit that part and the result is the same: nothing
>arm license is know to be less than friendly
Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.
No one has yet produced a RISC-V CPU or SoC with truly competitive CPU and GPU performance and compatibility to the current state of arm64 or amd64.
It’s a catch-22: why build a RISC-V CPU if there’s no software for it, and why write software if there’s no CPU to run it?
Until there's a common, well-supported, and sufficiently performant family of RISC-V SoCs or CPUs with support for existing well-supported GPUs, RISC-V support will be a massive pain in the ass of a moving/fragmented target.
This has held back Arm for years, even today the state of poor GPU drivers for otherwise good Arm SoCs. There is essentially a tiny handful of Arm systems with good GPU support.
That's a geopolitical question.
ARM is Western
RISC is China / Eastern
Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're doing a magnificent job of it.
Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows. Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet. There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to Valve.
*RISC-V
ARM is a RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_comput...
> RISC is China / Eastern
Imo this is a really strange characterization of RISC. I've never seen this before. I think you try to paint a misleading picture in bad faith, please consider this: - https://riscv.org/blog/how-nvidia-shipped-one-billion-risc-v... - https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/risc-v-cpu - https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... - https://www.sifive.com - ... - https://riscv.org/about/ -> "RISC-V International Association in Switzerland"
Sure, but that's orthogonal to geopolitics and intelligence.
US policy makers are actively attacking RISC-V and dissuading its use.
China has an increasingly large upper hand in the RISC-V ecosystem and can use that to remove Western surveillance and replace it with their own.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c...
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/regarding-proposed-u...
No: RISC is open ARM is closed.
I suspect that many projects—such as BOOM—have stalled as a consequence of this situation. If it continues, the long-term impact will be highly detrimental for everyone involved, including stakeholders in Western countries.
RISC-V the ISA is open; RISC-V implementations need not be. There's no reason to believe that any truly high-performance implementations will be usefully open.
There are also many high-performance Chinese implementations that are open-source (e.g., XuanTie C910, XiangShan, etc.).
While achieving an open-core design comparable to Zen 5 is unlikely in the near term, a sustained open-source collaborative effort could, in the long run, significantly change the situation. For example, current versions of XiangShan are targeting ~20 SPECint 2006/GHz (early where at ~9).
Yeah, but then the US doesn't get to spy on you anymore ;)
Stuff tends to stay open until a new leader emerges. Then the closed source shell appears.
We've seen this with the hyperscalers and in a million other places.
Use open to pressure and weed out incumbents and market leaders. Then you're free to do whatever.
So we'd be replacing NSA spying with MSS spying.
And since China has such a lead, you'll be using their implementations.
That's why this is geopolitical.
The DoD and Five Eyes prefer ARM, where the US maintains a strong lead.
2026 will be the year of the linux desktop
If you ever get Linux to boot on your Snapdragon notebook...
I’m interested in seeing Proton perform on Arm for Windows x86 games. That sounds like a real challenge.
I was also delighted to see Steam has an effort underway for Android on Linux, allegedly a fork of Waydroid, that they are working on. Tentatively delighted because it's unclear if this really will be open source, but hopefully! https://steamdb.info/app/3029110/info/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valves-version-of-andr...
I don't need Android apps that often, but it would be neat for the options here to expand and improve. I want to say much as Proton has accelerated things, but man, I am pretty lost now tracking which projects Proton encompasses and the history of where Valve backed/helped these efforts.
I still really want to believe it's collaborative. That good work is going to flow upstream, to collaborated Valve + crowd spaces.
This is news how exactly since the announcement of arm Steam Frame?
Did they at the same time announced that they had been funding open source ARM compatibility for over a decade? Maybe it was mentioned somewhere, but the article had new details for me at least, even if I consider myself somewhat up-to-date generally.
Agreed. I saw the Steam Frame announcement, and plan to get one as soon as it's available.
I saw the mention of Fex then too, but absolutely nowhere, before now have I seen any information that they'd been working on this for the best part of a decade.
I think it's more revealing of how they've been playing the long game
I thought for a moment from the title that Valve has finally started funding game developers to make content from SteamOS, but no, this is just another case where Valve pays some contractors for open source projects and force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility.
Why the vitriol? This is one of the rare cases where a company actually puts money in open source development. Of course they ultimately do it for business reasons but everyone benefits from it as a whole, so I fail to understand the issue here.
Because the title mislead me. It turned out that 0 windows games are receiving funding to add ARM compatibility.
Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.
> force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility
How are they forcing developers? If developers don't think it's worth it to make their game compatible with Steam Deck, can't they just avoid doing that?
They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if they do it because there is no other player in the space that would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support. Practically every other company with an game platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for them to 100% opt out of being on that platform.
> Practically every other company with an application platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform.
the only platforms I've ever heard of this for were Windows Phone and the Epic Store
both of which were runaway commercial successes
Have you ever heard of terms like "Playstation exclusive" before? Companies benefit from having good content on their platform and they typically are willing to pay for it.
Not since Bloodborne, I haven't. And I've heard people can play that game on Steam Deck now, too: https://youtu.be/eDHiVsr-jfM
These days the only context I hear "Playstation exclusive" in comes from people trying to analyze how much money Sony lost developing Concord.
I'm sure those developers hate getting a larger install base for free.
It's not just a larger install base. Those users may require extra support, those users may tank your reviews, those users may have a worse looking game or one that crashes a lot that can result in reputational damage.