[HN Gopher] Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
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Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
Author : TingPing
Score : 301 points
Date : 2025-11-21 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.igalia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.igalia.com)
| fidotron wrote:
| > This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that's
| exactly what we've done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS
| Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs.
|
| Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
|
| Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
| wronglebowski wrote:
| It's incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was
| looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their
| Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having
| Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it
| disabled.
| ryandrake wrote:
| So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see
| software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a
| chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they
| will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely
| enough quality to sell their hardware.
| ozarkerD wrote:
| It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware
| right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer,
| the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies
| me.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| Software is easier than hardware in general but companies
| generally pay their hardware guys 25-50% less than their
| software counterparts
| Melatonic wrote:
| Software can always ship a new update for bugs or
| features.
|
| Hardware not so much
| bri3d wrote:
| It's different definitions of "easy."
|
| With hardware, you have about one billion validation
| tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're
| done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very
| very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However,
| this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an
| "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based,
| and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests,
| it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly
| architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it
| works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.
|
| On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and
| subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux
| working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile
| kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With
| Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them
| upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality
| management, but Valve's choice here), deal with
| maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every
| release will break them (not common), or give up and
| release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset
| (which is what most people do). I don't really think this
| is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I've done both. There are difficulties with both but
| overall I would say software is significantly more
| difficult than hardware.
|
| Most hardware is actually _relatively_ simple (though
| hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an
| incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much
| arbitrarily complex.
|
| In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are
| mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies
| like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that
| software developers have that enable them to write
| extremely complicated programs.
|
| I have hope for Veryl though.
| poly2it wrote:
| What do you think about Atopile? I'm not a hardware
| person yet, but these seem similar.
|
| https://atopile.io/
| andyferris wrote:
| But - doesn't open sourcing it kinda make it someone else's
| chore?
|
| Obviously it has to "work" at sale but ongoing maintenance
| could be shared with the community.
| colechristensen wrote:
| They're stuck in the building model of making semi-custom
| SoCs for enormous corporations and releasing/developing
| drivers for them in extreme NDA environments.
|
| It's fine (or arguably not) for locked down corporate
| devices.
|
| Not so fine for building computers people want to use and own
| themselves.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Glad too see that while Qualcomm tries to keep things closed
| shut tightly, Valve and their contractors are trying to do the
| opposite.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
|
| Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they
| sell games. These devices are merely another storefront.
|
| Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will
| into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a
| cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community.
|
| Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by
| [mostly] doing right by the consumer. I'm not sure if there's
| more to the secret source, her sauce, because we've yet to see
| another CEO pull their head out of their arse far enough to see
| how lucrative this approach can be: consumerism is fickle,
| fanaticism is loyal.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to
| having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats.
| Etc.
|
| It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably
| somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve
| looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on
| occasion.
|
| When your competition is EA... it's not hard.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| I also just love that in open source you can call something
| "Turnip" because you're not marketing it to anyone.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the
| products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts.
| They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather
| than locking it down.
| zem wrote:
| I had barely played games for years, and got a steam deck just
| because it seemed like a cool linux device I could use both for
| gaming and tinkering. it has definitely gotten me back into
| gaming in a big way, the experience really is very nice.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes! The Deck is the closest I've gotten to getting into
| gaming. I especially loved the "press the power button and
| your game is immediately right there" aspect of it.
|
| I ended up selling it to a friend because I enjoy making
| things much more, but the Deck is such a fantastic device.
| pipes wrote:
| It's a great device, I mainly use it for emulation. The fact
| that it's properly an open platform is amazing.
| palata wrote:
| Same here! I actually stopped playing when I moved entirely
| to Linux, and have been running on laptops without a good GPU
| solution since then.
|
| I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product
| and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I
| love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I just wish my hands wouldn't cramp on hand-held devices.
| I've never been able to use handhelds for longer than thirty
| minutes.
|
| Goes for console controllers too.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Maybe you need larger controllers ?
|
| Also possible the touchpads are better for fatigue than
| joysticks
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| That's what happens when you don't need to please the
| shareholders.
| stavros wrote:
| That's very true, and I didn't realize it until you just said
| it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while
| being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open
| source work.
| sabellito wrote:
| I'd like to see that comparison tracking the number of devs
| and how much open source software each company uses.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| They seem to be skimping out on their contributions to
| FFmpeg.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google has contributed many patches to ffmpeg. Valve has
| contributed 0 as far as I am aware.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They aren't. Sometimes headlines are misleading.
| ozarkerD wrote:
| Valve employs like <400 people
| Zambyte wrote:
| But what percentage of what Google has produced has been
| Free Software vs what percentage of what Valve has
| produced? Google may have produced more Free Software, but
| Google also produces way more things.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I don't think this very practical or relevant here, but I
| expect Google to have a higher percentage. Valve
| employees are focused on Valve's proprietary software:
| Steam, SteamVR, their games, etc. Valve more often pays
| contractorsto work on open source software than work on
| it themselves.
|
| My comment was more to prove that it possible to do open
| source while having share holders. My claim that Google
| does more is auxiliary to it.
| bityard wrote:
| If you think publicly-held companies are bad, you should see
| what private equity gets up to.
| layer8 wrote:
| There's probably a better way to sponsor Valve than to buy
| physical products you won't use. That has pretty low monetary
| efficiency for the purpose.
| stavros wrote:
| But maybe I'll use them!
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, you did state "just to support their OSS efforts". ;)
| stavros wrote:
| The pleasurable after the useful!
| downrightmike wrote:
| Steam gift cards
| righthand wrote:
| I'd wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller,
| and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open
| source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is
| the only product that open source and supports that vision.
|
| Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their
| open source work is for everyone except Valve.
| TingPing wrote:
| What do you mean by "open source the Machine"? Valve has
| stated its a regular open PC. The whole driver stack is open.
| righthand wrote:
| The hardware, like they did with the Steam Deck.
| TingPing wrote:
| I guess you mean the CAD files for the shell? I'm not
| sure that is the most important part but it would be
| nice.
| righthand wrote:
| Sorry my point is that the Steam Deck is the only product
| of theirs that really supports beneficial open source in
| software and hardware. If you don't think fossing the
| case is enough then you're making my point for me that
| buying the machine, frame, or controller doesn't do
| anything for foss.
|
| It'd be like donating to Mozilla and expecting the money
| to go to Firefox development.
| 8676456497096 wrote:
| Valve paying for the development of KDE, Wine and
| adjacent projects is beneficial for FOSS.
| kaoD wrote:
| Steam Deck is not free software, is it?
|
| The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is
| not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already
| an improvement over... everything else.)
|
| [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at
| very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on
| their games, but if you don't buy the games...
|
| They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam
| Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people
| buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use
| without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If
| you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for
| ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam
| Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an
| extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be
| gamers.
|
| Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license,
| and the Steam Machine doesn't.
| stavros wrote:
| I do buy quite a few games, which usually end up unplayed. A
| few times I do binge one, so it's generally worth it for me.
| I'd like the Steam Machine for playing games in my living
| room with friends etc, even though it might end up unused,
| but the OSS support really swings the scale towards "take my
| money".
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam
| Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people
| buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use
| without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear.
|
| I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC
| (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for
| explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-
| power living room HTPC with _native_ /first-class Linux
| support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's
| quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my
| living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games
| for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already
| given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game
| sales.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Anybody who has a gaming PC isn't the target market for the
| Steam Machine. They're going after the console market with
| the value add of "also it's a real computer that can do
| real computer stuff".
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I assume Value is happy if you buy just 1 or 2 games for
| your Steam Deck or Steam Machine. It's the people that buy
| exactly 0 games that they claim to be worried about. IOW,
| not consumers, but companies buying work PC's.
| yojat661 wrote:
| They could offer a $X steam credits with their steam hardware
| for a win win.
| troupo wrote:
| Igalia is a superhero company doing a lot of great work with
| surprisingly little fanfare.
|
| Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless
| extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-
| awaited features"
| amazari wrote:
| Indeed, their work on WebKit, Servo, Mesa drivers, the kernel,
| and more is seriously impressive!
|
| Their customers, Valve, in this case, deserve credit for being
| good FLOSS citizens (even if they are building a DRM walled
| garden on top of it :/), but the actual workers are the real
| unsung heroes. Them, Codethink, Collabora, and other open-
| source consultancies I might have missed are doing the
| community a huge service."
| atrus wrote:
| Steam DRM is entirely optional. Blame the publishers for DRM.
| Uvix wrote:
| Valve doesn't disclose ahead of purchase whether a title
| has Steam DRM or not. So even if publishers don't take the
| option, I have no way to know that. Which means the option
| effectively doesn't exist.
| chmod775 wrote:
| You can ship DRM-free games on it just fine. It's up to the
| dev/publisher.
|
| Additionally you can get a lot of the benefits of Steam
| (Proton etc.) even for titles you didn't acquire through
| Steam - you can add and launch third party executables
| through the Steam client.
|
| Steam is not exactly a walled garden save for some rather
| light curation of their own store.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| Nothing to contribute other than to say that article was an
| awesome read and now I wish I had the specific skills needed to
| work at Igalia. :)
| robotnikman wrote:
| Same feeling here! I never really dug much into the low level
| graphics side of thing.
| jorvi wrote:
| Really cool stuff! Especially nice to see the groundwork being
| laid for what could become very efficient handhelds, considering
| how much performance Apple's M-series and Qualcomm's Elite series
| with relatively few watts. Much better than AMD, Intel or Nvidia.
|
| One nit: it's too bad Valve / Igalia choose to completely ignore
| the lessons from Bazzite.
|
| Bazzite already runs a scheduler like LAVD, called BORE[0]. It
| would have saved them a lot of work to extend and improve that
| rather than invent the wheel again. I'm not sure if Valve and
| Igalia are unaware of Bazzite and BORE or if this is a case of
| NIH.
|
| [0]https://github.com/firelzrd/bore-scheduler
| rpmisms wrote:
| It's incredibly obvious that they're trying to make Steam Deck 2
| ARM-based. That's the generational change Valve is waiting for.
|
| This is gonna be fantastic.
| sbarre wrote:
| Huh, I had not connected those (hypothetical) dots, but I could
| see it..
|
| Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-
| based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86
| one with AMD's next-gen APU...
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah, there's a real gap in the market for a relatively
| compact handheld which can play low-spec PC games. The AMD-
| based handheld PCs available today are all pretty chunky.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's plenty of "relatively compact" ARM-based handhelds
| targeting the retro market already, but many of them are
| shipping with a pitiful amount of RAM (1GB or so) making
| them an absolute non-starter, while others (selling for
| significantly higher prices) run crappy Android-based OS's
| that will never be updated. There is a gap in the market
| for a good-quality retro-like handheld shipping with a
| Linux-native OS (or even just enabling one to be installed
| _trivially_ after-the-fact, with everything working and no
| reliance on downstream hacked-together support packages).
| Spivak wrote:
| Why not just make a performant ARM device? Apple demonstrated
| to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.
| jsheard wrote:
| Sure, but Apple isn't selling their silicon to anyone else
| and Valve, successful as they are, don't have Apples money
| and economy-of-scale to throw at designing their own state-
| of-the-art CPU/GPU cores and building them on TSMCs state-
| of-the-art processes. Valve will have to roll with whatever
| is available on the open market, and if that happens to
| suck compared to Apples stuff then tough shit.
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| I'm definitely dreaming but I think it could be a win-win
| situation if Apple decided to licence its chips to Valve:
| the resulting handheld and VR headsets would be
| power/efficiency monsters and PC devs would finally have
| a good reason to target ARM, which could finally bring
| native PC gaming to MACs.
| jsheard wrote:
| The Nintendo Switch already provides >150 million reasons
| for gamedevs to care about porting their games to ARM,
| but that hasn't moved the needle for the Mac. Being ARM-
| based is the least of its problems, the problem is that
| it's a tiny potential market owned by a company which is
| actively hostile to the needs of game developers.
| Melatonic wrote:
| If they did an AMD CPU using the same TSMC node that Apple
| uses for Arm CPUs it wouldn't be that much less power
| efficient and have much great compatibility.
|
| They would realistically gain the most efficiency by getting
| Nvidia to design a modern super power efficient GPU like what
| was used in the original switch and Nvidia Shield. AMD GPUs
| can be great for desktop gaming but in terms of power
| efficiency to performance ratio Nvidia is way ahead
|
| An AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU might be a hard thing to actually
| negotiate however given that AMD is big in the GPU space as
| well. As far as I know most "APU" aren't really that special
| and just a combo of GPU and CPU
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| APUs have the GPU and CPU on the same package, or sometimes
| even the same die (with tiling). If there was to be an
| Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU type system, they would have to be
| separate packages.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I wouldn't go that far but they are clearly poised for that,
| should it be adventageous.
|
| The Frame is essentially there already, with what should be the
| top mobile arm setup.
|
| If an x86 chipset dropped that fit their needs better, I don't
| think Valve would hesitate. I think it's just a matter of Valve
| trying to enable the best options down the road, whatever they
| may be.
| l11r wrote:
| There are no ARM chips with enough power. They have said many
| times that they are not interested in minor performance
| improvements but rather want a leap. The Snapdragon X2 Elite
| chip is the leader (I cannot count Apple; they won't share
| their chips, obviously), but it doesn't even match AMD with
| their RDNA 3.5, and who knows when they will (or even if).
| MBCook wrote:
| I agree they won't do a Steam Deck 2 that's ARM. Maybe in the
| future?
|
| BUT, what about a "Steam Deck Mini"? Something at/above the
| current Steam Deck, maybe a little closer to Switch 2, but
| smaller/thinner/maybe a little cheaper?
|
| Yeah you're not going to run Cyberpunk 2087: Johnny's Rent Is
| Due. But older games, less demanding indie games, and many
| emulators would still work great. Plus remote play of your
| big desktop if you have one.
|
| I'm not saying they will, but I could see it as a
| possibility.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| The Steam Frame shows a lot of promise in terms of letting people
| play games on a massive virtual screen. But with the hardware,
| even more is possible. I hope they are working on a compatibility
| layer that allows 2D games to be rendered in 3D, like the 3D TV
| of the 2010s. In my opinion that would be a killer app.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| You mean like VorpX?
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| VITURE's Immersive 3D already offers this for several platforms
| (for VITURE glasses).
| Philpax wrote:
| There are rumours that they are working on this, but I assume
| they've chosen to keep the exact software experience of the
| Frame under wraps for now. It would certainly make the
| experience of gaming on a giant virtual screen even better!
| asmor wrote:
| The Winlator-releated ecosystem already works pretty well, there
| just isn't a good frontend or integration for it yet. That's what
| is really exciting here.
|
| Gamehub is a proprietary app by a Chinese controller manufacturer
| with some suspicious behavior and several LGPL violations that
| unfortunately works much better then the alternatives. Funnily
| enough their CDN endpoint is called "bigeyes", which when
| researching a bit was apparently their (failed) effort to bring
| x86 VR to ARM almost 10 years ago. Some people have "debloated"
| the app, but it seems very amateur hour to me and the process
| isn't very transparent (the GitHub repo is just a readme)
|
| There's also GameNative, which seems promising, but is very
| buggy.
|
| And Winlator itself, which is a mess of tons of tunables and
| different forks that I really don't have the patience for when PC
| handhelds exist today and have a much better ecosystem.
| systematizeD wrote:
| I wonder if they(valve) sponsor servo
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