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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Snapdragon doesn't really have a good history of supporting proper desktop games. Windows for ARM had kinda bad compatibility. It seems the aim is to have most games just be playable like with the Deck. Fingers crossed but I have some reservations.

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Their new mini PC isn’t ARM (the Frame is, though), it’s AMD hardware like the Steam Deck. Appears to be x86, should play basically anything in my library at 1080p or higher as long as it works under SteamOS.

I know but the Frame supports regular x86 games as well in standalone mode.

you run FEX, not direct ARM games

That doesn't magically fix the Qualcomm GPU or the drivers.

I don’t think you will be on latest nightly. LTS are good and stable, if FEX is targeting those specs I don’t see a stability issue.

The GPU is fine and the drivers Valve are using, if their past hardware is any indication, will be open source. Doesn't magically fix them, but it does allow for Valve to fix them.

If valve can convince Qualcomm to open source their GPU drivers I will eat a banana peel. They would need to write a new one from scratch (or reuse freedreno, but those are going to have performance issues).

Not the first time Valve funded the development of FOSS drivers. They've already done so with Intel's Vulkan stack on Linux, AMD (AMDGPU) and Nvidia (NVK).

SteamOS's core functionality leans heavily on Mesa and there's been a lot of commits for the Adreno 750 lately, mostly coming from Linaro.

Fair enough. The problem is usually in terms of getting enough documentation and help to do this in a cost effective manner. If they manage to pull it off, I will start to second guess every phone OEM who seems to not go down this road.

It kinda does. Qualcomm's DirectX drivers were the big issue, and Valve is using Mesa instead.

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