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Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

849 points by TingPing

by fidotron

8 subcomments

> 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.

by rpmisms

7 subcomments

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.

by jorvi

2 subcomments

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

by troupo

2 subcomments

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"

by dcdc123

2 subcomments

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. :)

by asmor

0 subcomment

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.

by dmix

0 subcomment

> “If you love video games, like I do, working on FEX with Valve is a dream come true,” said Paulo Matos, an engineer with Igalia’s Compilers Team
Life is great sometimes. Particularly when your nerd hobbies like contributing to open source connects you with important industries so you get justly rewarded

by torginus

2 subcomments

Considering all this work is open-source, could some third party make a Qualcomm Snapdragon based handheld console, if Valve decides not to make a Steam Deck Mini?
I really loved the idea of the Steam Deck, but I'd prefer to play something that's more like the size of a PSP or a Switch Lite at most.

by geokon

0 subcomment

"much of our work extends back through years of Snapdragon hardware, and we regression test it to make sure it stays Vulkan conformant"
would have been nice to hear of a specific device that now has Vulcan support
id be curious what the ballpark cost and time frame of the work was
im honestly surprised the technical expertise to do it (without qualcomms help) is even out there bc this is a space that has notoriously slow development relative to user interest

by stavros

6 subcomments

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.

by uejfiweun

4 subcomments

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.

by sandGorgon

1 subcomments

the Qualcomm Adreno 750 GPU is a Snapdragon Gen 3 device. This is basically an android device.
I wonder why Valve is maintaining a separate linux and driver fork for this. Snapdragon Gen 3 android game SDK works very well...including Windows emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hsQ_-8HV6g
not saying what Valve is doing is not spectacular. But i cant help but wonder if it isnt a more productive use of their resources to mainline this in Android ? Maybe even accelerate the Desktop Android merge (which Qualcomm is pushing ! https://www.theverge.com/news/784381/qualcomm-ceo-seen-googl...)
Android that is Valve compatible will further Valve's goals of open platforms than maintaining their own fork.

by drchaim

0 subcomment

So proud to see a Spanish company working on this low-level stuff

by pojzon

0 subcomment

I really hope steam machine and steam deck will plow gaming industry monopolies.
I want to move away from Windows completely also for my gaming hobby but cant yet fully.
I also want to ravage Nintendo monopoly and unwillingness to let me play old games they no longer want to support AND dont want to let me play.
I rly rly hope Valve will make it and we can ditch those companies with shady practices.

by systematizeD

3 subcomments

I wonder if they(valve) sponsor servo

by koolala

0 subcomment

Wonder if later they will get to do WebXR Browser work for Linux / this hardware too.

0 subcomment

by saborineko

0 subcomment

Cool！