Abstract:
Valve is accelerating the addition of Nvidia GeForce graphics card support to SteamOS, and relevant work has made substantial progress. Valve software developer Pierre-Loup Griffais revealed that the NVIDIA driver has been added to the main development branch of SteamOS, and some generations of GeForce GPUs have been able to complete initialization and output images in the system. However, it will still take a lot of work to reach a full level of support that is truly suitable for the game, and the entire process may even take several years.
Griffais said that Valve is currently actively promoting support for Nvidia graphics cards and has listed it as one of the company's key tasks. He pointed out that this work is similar to the FEX compatibility layer and Qualcomm driver development, and they are all projects that require long-term investment. Currently, SteamOS internal testing can enable NVIDIA drivers and allow some NVIDIA GPUs to display images normally, but this is only the early stage of the entire adaptation process.
The biggest problem right now is still game performance. Although some NVIDIA GPUs can already work under SteamOS, the performance is still significantly behind NVIDIA's mature driver version for Linux. Valve said that relevant development is making progress every day, but there is still a long way to go before officially providing mature and widely compatible support.
SteamOS currently has more mature support for AMD graphics cards, which is the main reason why Valve currently recommends that AMD GPUs be given priority when installing SteamOS on PC. SteamOS has begun to expand from Steam Deck to third-party handheld consoles and Steam Machines and other devices, but for traditional gaming PCs equipped with Nvidia graphics cards, official support is still missing.
The importance of NVIDIA graphics card support is particularly prominent because NVIDIA GPUs account for the vast majority of the Steam hardware survey. According to a recent survey data, about 73% of the Steam user systems participating in the survey use Nvidia graphics cards. This means that if SteamOS hopes to truly become a mainstream PC gaming platform outside of Windows, it will be difficult to bypass Nvidia hardware in the long term.
Valve has been significantly expanding the scope of SteamOS in recent years. In addition to Steam Deck, the company has begun to support more third-party handheld and PC hardware, and plans to further make SteamOS a universal game operating system that can be installed on various PCs. If the Nvidia driver is finally fully supported, users will be able to run SteamOS on more desktops, laptops and other gaming devices equipped with GeForce graphics cards, which may further promote the development of the Linux gaming ecosystem.
Valve has previously cooperated closely with NVIDIA to develop relevant driver support for SteamOS. Rather than limiting this work to one piece of hardware, the company hopes to gradually build a universal support system that can cover more generations of GeForce GPUs. However, since the NVIDIA driver under Linux involves multiple levels such as graphics stack, kernel, display server, and game performance, it requires a lot of engineering work to ultimately achieve stability and performance comparable to AMD's solution.
In addition to NVIDIA graphics card support, Valve is currently promoting the expansion of SteamOS to the Arm platform. The company plans to explore this direction starting with the recently launched Steam Frame VR headset. The Steam Frame uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, so Valve needs to solve the problem of running traditional x86 PC games on the Arm platform.
On Steam Frame, Valve uses the FEX compatibility layer to convert x86 software to run on the Arm platform, while running Android applications through Lepton. The idea is similar to Steam Deck using Proton to run Windows games, except that Steam Frame faces a different processor architecture.
Valve believes that if Steam and SteamOS can further mature their support for the Arm platform, then Steam games may be expanded to more product forms such as tablets, smartphones, Arm notebooks, and gaming devices using Qualcomm chips in the future. At the same time, Microsoft is also promoting the Arm version of Windows and trying to integrate Windows more closely with the Snapdragon platform and future NVIDIA RTX Spark and other devices.
However, for SteamOS, the graphics card driver is not the only problem that needs to be solved. Anti-cheating systems remain another major obstacle facing the Linux gaming ecosystem. Although more and more anti-cheating manufacturers are beginning to support the Arm version of Windows and related new hardware, SteamOS is still unable to run some popular online games properly, including large games such as "Grand Theft Auto" and "Call of Duty".
Therefore, Valve is currently solving multiple problems at the same time: on the one hand, it needs to make SteamOS cover Nvidia, AMD and more processor platforms at the hardware level; on the other hand, it needs to continue to improve Windows game compatibility and anti-cheating support. Only when these links gradually mature can it be possible for SteamOS to truly develop from an operating system on specific devices such as Steam Deck to a general PC gaming platform that can compete with Windows.
Currently Valve has not announced a specific timetable for the official release of NVIDIA GeForce drivers. At this stage, it is already possible to run some NVIDIA GPUs in the main development branch of SteamOS. This only shows that the relevant work has moved from the early development stage to the actual hardware verification stage. It does not mean that full support is approaching. According to Valve, although Nvidia support is already a priority, final completion may still take several years.
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