Expanded Steam gaming compatibility likely coming to Arm chips with hundreds of Windows games — Valve testing ARM64 Proton compatibility layer

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
(Image credit: Warner Bros Interactive)

On September 20, Valve pushed changes to a test application visible on SteamDB indicating a massive list of games being tested with its Proton compatibility layer. Interestingly, there now also seems to be an ARM64 version of Proton, which exists to make Windows games playable on Linux. This version of Proton, "proton-arm64ec-4", is listed as being tested with literal hundreds of games, but popular titles like Left 4 Dead 2 and Shadows of Mordor stick out here, showing a wide range of possibilities with ARM64 Proton behind the scenes.

Now, what does all of this mean? While Valve has yet to make any kind of official announcement regarding ARM64 support on SteamOS, or for Proton, it clearly seems to be a priority and part of its push for gaming on Linux, in general. Now, though, Valve seems to want to expand its Linux gaming audience from just x86 hardware, and start folding in Linux Arm devices in line with ongoing efforts to improve gaming on Windows for Arm. There are also some mentions of Waydroid, which means even Android Arm devices may be getting Proton support, which would surely expand its audience significantly.

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. More pressingly, introducing a yet lower, yet more obscure Arm gaming device tier alongside the Steam Deck and its eventual successors seems a questionable idea at best. However, improving support for Arm devices, in general, is certainly in line with Valve's established history of backing the Linux gaming scene versus the locked-down Windows ecosystem.

Considering the early stage of Arm gaming on Windows, Valve's work on Proton for Arm also raises some interesting long-term questions for existing Arm devices, especially the high-end Snapdragon X chips. 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. As it currently stands, a very large number of games confirmed to work on Windows for Arm are already listed as being tested by Valve in these SteamDB changes.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

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  • ezst036
    Admin said:
    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.
    Reply
  • vanadiel007
    Qualcomm bidding on Intel does not sound so odd anymore...
    Reply
  • 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.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    ezst036 said:
    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
    ezst036 said:
    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.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    erazog said:
    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.
    Reply
  • koseke3410
    Looking forward for SteamOS appearing on another platforms, can't wait to ditch my Windows for SteamOS
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    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.
    Reply
  • 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.
    Reply
  • mitch074
    thestryker said:
    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.
    Reply
  • Heizard
    ezst036 said:
    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. ;)
    Reply