TL;DR: Valve launched the Steam Frame VR headset with an Arm-based Snapdragon chip, aiming to run Half-Life: Alyx natively and streamed from PC. The new hardware features a “Frame Verified” status for optimized games, while rumors suggest two upcoming Half-Life titles supporting PC and VR cooperative play.
No, they are building a translation framework for x86
Yes, but they’re making a build specifically for this set. They own all the source code. Presumably that means they made this version native for ARM.
Considering the big rise in ARM PCs it’s completely logical that they start supporting it more too, allowing devs to make and distribute ARM builds.
I’m…not sure what you mean. They’ve just compiled SteamOS and it’s base for arm64. There was nothing stopping that from happening previously. The majority of the client code is closed, and that entire piece of SteamOS is weaved into the OS itself. So they’re just distributing arm64 builds if SteamOS with the client code, not commiting to a standalone client being distributed, unless you’ve seen that somewhere.
No, but it seems like a logical step is all. Allow devs to distribute ARM binaries of their game. Release Steam for ARM.
If they do the work anyhow no sense in wasting it.
I mean…once they have this going, there’s nothing stopping that. It’s essentially the same thing, except the hooks for Mac/Win for the desktop. Linux will already be ready to go. I just haven’t heard them mention it is a point of release is all.
I think they meant the Steam client.
Plus they already said that they would support game binaries built for ARM. Would be stupid not to.
Support meaning in their build system. They’ve already added that as a build option awhile ago. Just means you can set a flag to build for more platforms now, and they have arm64 machine types to handle the builds.
Devs still need to do optimizations to support this in most cases. Some games based on open frameworks won’t have much to do but flip the switch.