Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

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"

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.

They are merely trying to commoditize their complement https://gwern.net/complement

Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.

Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under him valve is such a consumer focused company

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).

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.

> 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.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

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.

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.

Valve employed Alyssa Rosenzweig while she developed the graphics stack for asahi linux. That's a very simple statement that masks the size of the achievement and its impact on the world. No, we haven't entered a golden era of gaming on macs, but the world has been shown the way. And no, the software challenges are not insurmountable.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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...

Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do. I'm no expert, but I do pay as close attention as I can to what's going on with gaming hardware because of my limited budget, and I'm guessing Steam Deck 2 is more like Q1 2028, not any time sooner. I'm ok with that. I play all the games I want on my Steam Deck OLED, and I see plenty of life left in it, even this "late" in the game.

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.

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

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.

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.

Why don't they just ask Copilot to do it?

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.

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.

The instruction set has marginal impact. But many power efficient chips happen to be using the ARM instruction set today.

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.

> isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about.

But game devs (at least of a certain type) are notorious for thinking about low-level hardware performance right from the start. As a class I'm pretty sure game devs use godbolt much, much more than your typical developer.

This system allows playing unmodified production x86 executables on arm64. It doesn’t have anything to do with the developers.

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.

>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.

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.

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.