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

276 pointsby evolve2kyesterday at 8:33 PM322 commentsview on HN

https://archive.is/AKhTr


Comments

adverblytoday at 6:47 PM

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.

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jchwtoday at 5:27 PM

> 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.

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the_aftoday at 10:57 PM

I cannot speak for the Steam console and I don't care about playing PC games on my phone: it's not the form factor for me.

But I'm really grateful for Valve and Steam.

Increasingly, more and more Windows-only games "just work" with Linux (or work with minor tweaks taken from ProtonDB).

I bought a Lenovo Legion a couple of weeks ago and I'm having a terrific experience with Linux+Steam so far. I don't claim to play the latest AAA games, but I don't feel the need to live at the edge anyway.

One game that has resisted running so far is Space Marine 2. Eventually I'll get it going. Some people report success.

PaulHouletoday at 5:10 PM

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.

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bigwheelstoday at 6:41 PM

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

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blibbletoday at 5:39 PM

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

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Perz1valtoday at 7:01 PM

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.

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mikkupikkutoday at 8:30 PM

Hypothetically, if Valve made a strong push to make SteamOS compatible with all Windows programs, not just games, could they make a serious run at knocking down Windows?

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tonetegeatinsttoday at 5:54 PM

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.

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simianparrottoday at 10:20 PM

Thank god. Microsoft has shown they don't care about their users as anything other than eyeballs to shove bullshit to for _years_ and Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8, and Valve has been working on this since.

Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.

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the__alchemisttoday at 6:02 PM

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.

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micromacrofoottoday at 6:08 PM

2026 will be the year of the linux desktop

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nullbytetoday at 6:37 PM

Yooo this is awesome, maybe we will finally get some game support on Macs now

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jauntywundrkindtoday at 6:43 PM

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.

pipeline_peaktoday at 6:28 PM

I’m interested in seeing Proton perform on Arm for Windows x86 games. That sounds like a real challenge.

Havoctoday at 7:50 PM

Now we just need qualcomm to sort out their linux snapdragon support

ant6ntoday at 7:50 PM

I find it kinda ironic that they phase out 32bit at the same time. I’d guess it would be easier to emulate 32but x86, although the difference perhaps goes away with a JIT.

baqtoday at 5:23 PM

This is news how exactly since the announcement of arm Steam Frame?

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charcircuittoday at 5:57 PM

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.

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