Valve announced a few new devices yesterday. There’s a new Steam console, which is essentially just a tiny PC with SteamOS installed – think of it as a Steam Deck without a display. Second, Valve finally released a new Steam Controller to go with the Steam console, which has taken them long enough. Lastly, there’s a brand new Steam VR headset, the Steam Frame. Other websites with actual access to these new devices will do a better job of covering them than I ever could, but I do want to highlight something crucially important about the Steam Frame: it contains a Snapdragon ARM processor, but can still run Steam and all of its games. How does this work?
Well, after developing Proton to allow Windows games to run on Linux, Valve “introduced” FEX, which will allow you to run x86 Windows games on ARM Linux. I put the quotation marks there because FEX was an existing project Valve invested heavily into in recent times, and it’s now at the point where Valve seems confident enough it will be capable of running enough x86 games on ARM Linux. As such, the Steam Frame runs full SteamOS with KDE Plasma, you can run x86 Steam games, and as an additional bonus, you can install Android APKs as well.
I’ve yet to even try VR, because I’m not particularly interested in buying into any locked-down platform. The Steam Frame may be the first VR device I’ll buy – depending on price, of course – and the Steam console definitely looks like a great addition to the living room, too. My wife and I have little to no interesting in buying an Xbox or PS5, but having easy, no-hassle access to our massive Steam libraries on our TV will be awesome.
While touting FEX as something new is not the best thing Valve could have done, the fact that helped an existing project instead of creating their own fork is commendable and can only be applauded for.
This must be exciting news to people using FEX today on their Asahi Linux Apple Silicon machines. It seems reasonable to assume that Steam will work well for them in the future. Good news for X Elite laptop owners too though they are still a rare breed.
I’ve already tried Wine with box64 on a Raspberry Pi, and it worked surprisingly smoothly. This included Google Earth Pro in Street View mode.
niebuszewo,
I tried that over the summer with RPI5 and it wasn’t able to run the x86 titles I tried to run satisfactorily. I kind of regretted buying an RPI5 instead of just going with an x86 PC that would just work. Now that Valve are working on their own solution I’d give it another shot though, They have the resources and motivation to make it a better experience and Valve know that ARM is a non-starter for mainstream gaming unless they solve this.
I found the RPI5 quite sluggish even with native games though, my expectations have been somewhat spoiled by high performance x86 computers with dedicated graphics cards, haha.
Alfman,
Raspberry PI 5, unlike the older brethren, requires active cooling.
Yes, it can still technically run with passive cooling only. However you will be throttled.
And while you are at it, you can overclock the CPU and RAM… and maybe a better API (vulkan) for the games makes it actually usable.
(According to Google, CPU has 25% headroom, GPU has about 30%, the RAM upgrade comes from firmware with better timings. But all of these require even better cooling)
But don’t expect 4K 60fps native gaming. More like 20 fps 1080p from DOOM 3 engine.
sukru,
I don’t recall seeing any indication it was throttled, I’d have to check again. In any case it does have a fan.
I’m not really interested in overclocking, even with my computers I prefer to run them within official specs to prolong lifetime. If anything I’d prefer to undervolt. To this end I am extremely disappointed with motherboard manufacturers, not because they don’t offer adjustment options, but because they’re guilty of pushing things beyond specs by default! Apparently marketing pressures them to do this. Sure they’ll get better scores this way but it’s cheating and can be detrimental to component lifespan.
My MSI motherboard accurately detects the ram’s 1.35V voltage and then precedes to apply 1.365V when XMP is enabled. This worked at first, but 3 of 4 dimms went on to develop faults before I discovered the motherboard was overvolting them by default. I went on to manually “undervolt” the new ram to spec. successfully at 1.344V, no problems since. I hate that I have to remember to reapply the correct voltage when I upgrade/reset the bios.
I investigated more motherboards and found that gigabyte was overvolting CPU by default too, WTF guys. Go ahead and offer this as an option, but I am extremely disturbed that they’re doing it without notification/permission. Go ahead and publish out of spec scores if you feel you must, but be honest and make it absolutely clear what you are doing. Intel got a lot of flack for CPUs burning out, but the blame wasn’t entirely theirs since motherboards out in the wild were running out of spec and customers didn’t know.
Anyway, this is quite a tangent, haha. Personally I’m not interested in overclocking the RPI.
I didn’t know there was an ARM version of DOOM3. I keep it simple and test with supertuxcart as a baseline. It’s an old game but I still had to disable tons of features to make it playable. The RPI5 is an improvement over predecessors, but my expectations for it still needed an alignment 🙂 It’s not the CPU that’s the bottleneck, it’s the integrated GPU that takes a toll. It’s a bottleneck even on high end ARM macs.
I find this hilarious, but some have managed to get dedicated GPU attached to RPI5 with excellent results…
“4K Gaming… on Raspberry Pi!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-ImUnRwjAo
By the time you buy all the components needed and jerry-rig everything together, I’d much rather have a pre-built SFF PC, on top of which you don’t need to worry about ARM issues. But the fact that this works is very interesting and proves that it’s doable. If this Valve project works well, maybe manufacturers will become more interested in offering higher performance gaming systems on ARM.
Alfman,
Undervolting is also technically overclocking. (In practice)
Why?
You would want to provide less voltage than the spec (which good), but also not apply the same curves (which would also put the CPU / GPU in lower clock mode).
In any case, this is the safest for of overclocking. As you don’t risk any burn out of the hardware. And worst case it become a bit unstable. (Usually it does not)
Once thay had proper PCIe support all bets became possible. Yes, the on board GPU is really out of date, and that is the reason most games run slow.
The engine is open source. So it is a source port, not an official one:
https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3
I think this is the most popular and preferred version.
(DOOM3 engine — id tech something something — was the last ever in their tradition of open sourcing older games)
Minor update
Turns out the open source “Doom 3 BFG” engine is referred as “id tech 4.5”, as it has some of the newer features from modern engines back ported to it (like multi-threaded execution or shadow mapping)
sukru,
I don’t really follow. In practice many if not most motherboards do allow us to tweak voltages and speeds independently (change one without changing the other). Many seek to undervolt without touching the clocks at all. If you are lucky enough with the silicon lottery, you may be able to have a stable system with stock performance but using less power, lower temps.
Of course at an electronic level the states represented by voltages are not instantaneous because bandwidth isn’t infinite. Those 0 & 1 signals under a sufficiently precise oscilloscope will actually look like a capacitor’s sawtooth response. Higher supply voltages help gates pull voltages up and down faster. Lowering the voltage too far will result in states being misread at a given speed. I guess this is what you’re talking about, but even with this in mind I would not interpret “undervolting” to be “overclocking”. Undervolting is just the act of reducing voltages, whether or not the resulting system is stable is a different matter – maybe it is or maybe it isn’t.
That’s cool. I’ve never played doom 3 and don’t have the original game files to try this with. I had been playing the old portal games with my son, little less gory, haha. I did try quake2 on linux with nvidia RTX rendering and it’s awesome that people can keep these games alive when we have source code. These old games will probably end up outliving most modern games for this very reason. Incorporating new features like RTX to old Quake games works ok, but the game’s old and intentionally rustic appearance made it a poor showcase for RTX IMHO.
They should port Unity and Unreal Engine to Windows on Arm and replace the games’ dlls with it. This would improve most of the games.
and now the next question becomes, diose nvidia/amd have drivers for arm / will their drivers run in this enviromnet. because it’s all well and god that the games start, but relying on sw rendering will kill any experience