Valve has said it’s “hard at work” on Steam Deck 2, while continuing to work on getting the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame out the door.
The improvements Valve made for the original Steam Deck and prep for the Steam Machine across the Linux ecosystem for schedulers, graphics drivers, io_uring, ntsync, KDE, Wine, etc. were massive, even outside of gaming.
I don’t see them expanding to ARM making as much of a difference to the ecosystem as their first forray.
That’s why I’m curious what improvements OP was thinking of; maybe there’s more than FEX that I’m not aware of
Generally x86 -> ARM is much easier on Linux than MacOS/Windows
You obviously know a lot about this stuff, I do not.
I’m excited for FEX, because even though some games can technically be played on arm right now, and even though you say it’s easy to convert (I have no idea), the fact is nobody is doing it 🤷♂️
I understand Valve did a lot of work to make gaming not only possible on Linux, but in some cases preferable.
From a layman’s non-software-developer perspective, regardless of how much actual effort is required by Valve… I hope that FEX will shift the industry as aggressively as proton did. I hope that gaming on arm becomes no big deal, easy to do with a click, and preferable in some cases. Whereas right now, it’s not that easy or performant, as I understand.
Linux has worked extremely well on ARM for at least 17 years. What improvements are you hoping an ARM based Steam Deck would make?
X86 on ARM.
So, primarily just forwarding OpenGL/Vulkan commands directly through FEX, rather than QEMU’s user mode?
Certainly helpful for games, but the majority of code on Linux boxes is recompiled to be native when using ARM
Well yeah, the Steam Deck is all about games.
The improvements Valve made for the original Steam Deck and prep for the Steam Machine across the Linux ecosystem for schedulers, graphics drivers, io_uring, ntsync, KDE, Wine, etc. were massive, even outside of gaming.
I don’t see them expanding to ARM making as much of a difference to the ecosystem as their first forray.
That’s why I’m curious what improvements OP was thinking of; maybe there’s more than FEX that I’m not aware of
Generally x86 -> ARM is much easier on Linux than MacOS/Windows
I’m not OP. But I think I share his sentiment.
You obviously know a lot about this stuff, I do not.
I’m excited for FEX, because even though some games can technically be played on arm right now, and even though you say it’s easy to convert (I have no idea), the fact is nobody is doing it 🤷♂️
I understand Valve did a lot of work to make gaming not only possible on Linux, but in some cases preferable.
From a layman’s non-software-developer perspective, regardless of how much actual effort is required by Valve… I hope that FEX will shift the industry as aggressively as proton did. I hope that gaming on arm becomes no big deal, easy to do with a click, and preferable in some cases. Whereas right now, it’s not that easy or performant, as I understand.
So I guess… I’m just excited, that’s all 🤷♂️