Beyond Steam Machine: Why Valve's New ARM Support Shouldn't Be Overlooked
Beyond Steam Machine: Why Valve's New ARM Support Shouldn't Be Overlooked
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Beyond Steam Machine: Why Valve's New ARM Support Shouldn't Be Overlooked
36 comments
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This is more exciting to me than the other hardware announcements. Linux on a phone that can have both a desktop mode and gaming right in my pocket? It's the dream.
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Desktop Linux on phone (or even better, tablet) hardware would be very interesting to me. But with how locked down bootloaders are in those devices? I don't have much hope for them currently.
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Big kinda. Ubuntu touch is a thing. There are only a handful of phones for which it fully works on. I have one of them (a Fairphone 5). It's pretty bare bones, but it seems fairly responsive with good battery life. The most recent version of the OS even has snapd baked into the OS, so you would think that it would mean I'm spoiled for choice in terms of applications but you run into an issue when trying to install the first of my only two deal breaker applications Bitwarden.
Bitwarden can be installed with snapd, but an arm64 version doesn't exist and the install fails. That's pretty indicative of what a Linux mobile phone effort is up against. Valve bridging the gap between ARM and Linux gives me a sliver of hope that we see a little more support from more applications for ARM more generally.
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Yeah that's downside.
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Every month I hope to read an article about some bug name using RISCV in consumer hardware as a flagship chip, but alas, it's ARM again.
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That will only happen for a company that cares about price and nothing else. The performance is vastly inferior, which matters in gaming.
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Is there a RISCV chip available with comparable performance & efficiency to current ARM chips? Seems like Valve would kill any chance their headset has if they unnecessarily reduced time between charging cycles.
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All the RISC-V chips I see in the wild so far are stationary or tiny (like some new ESP wifi chips now run on RISC-V)
Mobile / laptop grade performance chips seems a few years away still, tons of optimizations needed (especially fast performance scaling and idle modes) for that
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Imagine taking an old phone out of the junk drawer and suddenly having another Steam Deck.
Even really old smartphones would work as a portable retro console.
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I have doubts that it would work well on the majority of older phones. I would think that the lack of a sizable memory pool would really be a hindrance to performance, let alone performing well for games. Hell, even on the Steam Deck, I have had to use Cryo tools to increase the page file to expand available memory in a couple of games to avoid crashing problems.
As for retro gaming, there are countless emulators already available on Android that work quite well. I can even play PS2 games on my phone surprisingly well.
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There are tons of modern indie games that would work great on a phone. Modern does not mean performance hog necessarily. Silksong would be great. I bet a lot of people would love Stardew Valley on mobile. Hades II would probably be good. There are tons that would be amazing.
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I play a good amount of games from my Steam library on my Android phone. A Snapdragon 8 elite phone. Pretty much things start becoming viable for old indie games on the Snapdragon 865 and then for bigger PS4 era PC games, 8 Gen 2 is about where it becomes viable. Then 8 Elite and Elite Gen 5 , solid performance but not great compatibility because of immature graphics drivers
One thing is that small phone OLED displays look good at 540-720p. Real nice for games that support 21:9
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36 comments
Every one should have the right to bear ARM.