> 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.
> 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.
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.
I have a super high opinion of Valve. Sure, they have loot crates. But sensible people don't buy them. I guess you could blame them for having it in the first place. That's fair I guess. But I've never for a second considered buying any of that junk.
I just buy single player offline games with no IAP, and Steam is amazing. It's a million miles ahead of the competitors, and it's really surprising that EA/Ubi etc.. try to compete but don't get the reason they're losing. They screw customers and then act surprised that customers hate them.
The problem with loot crates, and the reason why they're being slowly regulated against in several places, is that "sensible people don't buy them" has never stopped people to lose their life to gambling.
I hope everyone who is so outspoken about loot crates are also fighting for TCG packs to be banned/regulated because they are literally the same level of "gambling".
People do compare TCGs to loot crates, in fact calling them the "original" loot crates. Also why "buy singles" has been the mantra for a long time.
Aside of gambling, packs have at least a plausible use for limited format.
Let's not forget mystery boxes for real toys and things like mini brands.
Though I am not outspoken about it, I think individuals need to come to terms with telling themselves no.
Otherwise we need to outlaw everything bad and open to abuse to specific individuals. Things such as cake, donuts, coffee, etc.
I think we can ban companies selling packages without disclosing exactly what is in those packages. I think we can regulate companies in that way without finding ourselves hopelessly slipping down some silly slope.
> Though I am not outspoken about it, I think individuals need to come to terms with telling themselves no.
This really resonates with me. I feel like self-control has gone out of fashion, but it has a lot of merit.
I think it's difficult to just call things "self control" when there have been entire college majors / studies / casinos dedicated to tricking us into making the choices they want.
Look at the Apple price ladder on ipads. Look at any tactic by a casino - go to Reno and see many retires at the beginning of the month drop their whole social security check in the casino. Look at why they label things $9.99 instead of $10.00 Look at why they put all the overpriced candy at the cash register in a super market. Look at how they create junk food to be "perfect" and addictive source: https://archive.globalpolicy.org/world-hunger/trade-and-food... I have a lot of friends that stopped playing gacha games because they would come home drunk - the game would incentivize you to login - and then blow more money than they truly wanted to.
At some level it's unfair to say we should just "have self control" when you have entire academic institutions and entire industries figuring out how to get you to "crack" and make a bad decision that favors their pocket book.
So yeah - I agree - we need more self control - but it's being purposefully assaulted every second of our day by EVERYTHING.
Yeah, existing in the modern world you're surrounded by mind-hackers. Everywhere you go there are hacking attempts against your mind, trying to get you to buy stuff you shouldn't or want stuff you don't. It's really absurd.
Well then regulation should help. And people should stop doing outright stupid things - you have no reason to be in casino, in same way you have no reason lighting that cigarette or doing another round of binge drinking (or those gacha games, had to google WTF that is, same mind cancer as the rest, no thank you). You, nor me are not stronger than those addictions. Billions of miserable poor fuckers before us are proof enough, learn from their mistakes.
Attack from both sides, heck all sides - from the top with regulation. From the bottom by being mentally more resilient, there are endless ways to get there - ie do rock climbing (yes, not joking, it will change you for the better for good if you stick long enough). Or other sports and activities that challenge you, your fears, your laziness, push yourself physically. Do it 10 times and something clicks in the mind and it goes almost on its own afterwards.
Another angle - shame those working in such business. Goes for fuck ton of FAANGS and many others. I know its blurry and whatever else of an excuse will fly around, don't care. Have a clearly moral work or accept shame, or change for the better.
Its a terrible situation but by far the biggest mistake is throwing hands in the air and giving up immediately just because some greedy sociopathic billionaire wants a bigger yacht or rocket to compensate even more for their fucked up childhood, and thus pushes a lot of psychology phds against you. You don't have to even start to play that game, not even for a second. We are stronger, much stronger than that and real good life (TM) is not about anything digital in any way.
That's because it mostly doesn't work long term.
Depending on how your brain got wired, self-control condemns you to a life of misery while not being exposed allows you to live a normal life. Of course you cannot ask for societal experience to be tailored just for you but there seem to be a consensus on protecting the most vulnerable people from the most destructive habits. Where to draw the line is for everyone to find agreement upon and if that's not good enough for you, you need to find a safe haven.
Self-control is like a tourniquet on a severed leg, it can buy you time but you need an hospital at some point
If self control were reliable we wouldn't need seatbelts, antilock brakes, bumpers, and other safety mechanisms. We would all just drive safely all the time. But that would be silly. Self control is not as simple and reliable as we want it to be.
Sometimes systematic solutions are better.
I agree that humans are fallible, but the analogy is still off despite being catchy, yet flawed. Seatbelts are passive mechanical systems; self-control is a complex, context-dependent cognitive function. Conflating the two oversimplifies how human behavior actually works.
There's definitely a double standard in the gaming community where people don't treat TCG packs as ethically fraught in the same way, despite being the same thing.
And loot boxes in Valve games never bothered me, because if you want a particular skin you can just buy it off the market. I can't remember being angry at Valve for having loot boxes.
All other games require you to keep opening loot boxes to get what you want.
Well not with their battle passes in Dota. They employed a lot of FOMO tactics where you had to spend hundreds to guarantee a set that you'll otherwise never be able to get again.
They've hedged their bets by making, and selling, both games whose monetization is exploitative and non-exploitative
The difference is that valve loot crates/hats have also always been tradeable, and Ive never had to buy them or suffer a disasvantage.
TF2 hats used to bring an advantage until about a decade ago.
That is simply not true. Hats have always been cosmetics only.
Some unusual hats even give you a disadvantage as they broadcast your position through sounds.
This video describes how, in the past, certain item sets, which included hats, gave stats boosts when worn together:
The author is completely ignoring that you didn't have to BUY these hats. For example, you could (and still can) craft the Milkman hat with 1 refined metal + 1 special delivery weapon.
All items had stats / skill changes, no?
Oh - were they already tradeable ?
> They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.
Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail.
But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.
> and give refunds so they get a free pass.
They only begrudgingly conceded refunds in 2015 after the no-refunds policy they had maintained for 12 years was found to be illegal in Australia.
Whatever the reason for their policy, it provides a nice sense of safety to Linux gamers. They can buy the game without worrying about compatibility; if the game doesn't run then its two clicks for an automated refund.
They made the new refund policy worldwide, which they absolutely did not have to.
Sure, but I imagine they saw the dominoes falling and realized that the optics of going down kicking and screaming in endless battles against basic consumer rights would be exceptionally bad. If they hadn't fully conceded then the EU would have been up their ass too before long.
> kicking and screaming in endless battles against basic consumer rights
“Apple has entered the chat.”
There are so many examples of other companies doing exactly that.
Also, competing stores like EA's Origin had a pretty friendly refund policy before Valve did, helping to put some pressure on Valve.
I seem to recall Origin initially reserving the right to revoke your license to play games you purchased after a few years of inactivity.
Classic EA.
"Oh, you haven't played this game in a while. You should pay us again if you wanna play it again. Give you a sense of pride and accomplishment!"
(reference for those who haven't seen it https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b... )
I truly believe that Valve has two fundamental things working in their favor:
Firstly: Despite inventing or at least popularizing a lot of new microtransaction concepts, they've just never been the greediest company in the business when it comes to microtransactions. Mobile gacha games have cleaned up their business quite a lot lately, with most of them being significantly less predatory than they used to be, but even back when TF2 introduced lootboxes and hats, the important thing was that the game was not pay to win; you could get all of the items in relatively short order just by playing, and the only benefit to paying was cosmetics.
Contrast this to the earlier reign of Korean MMOs: pretty much all of them had egregious microtransactions. MapleStory, PangYa, Gunbound, etc, and even some current platforms like Roblox. Valve also came into this whole thing before lootboxes became the root of all evil, and while TF2's lootbox mechanism looks bad in retrospect, there was simply no stigma against a system like that, and it never felt like a big deal during the game's heyday. Just my opinion, but I strongly believe it to be true.
Secondly: The most egregious things going on are not things Valve is directly involved in, they are merely complicit, in that they don't do much to curtail it. It's not even necessarily cynical to say that Valve is turning a blind eye, they benefit so significantly from the egregious behavior that it is hard to believe they are not influenced by this fact. But: It is consistent with Valve's behavior in other ways: Valve has taken a very hands-off stance in many places, and if it weren't for external factors it seems likely they would be even more hands-off than they are now. I think they genuinely take the position that it's not their job to enforce moral standards, and if you really do take this position seriously it is going to wind up looking extremely bad when you benefit from it. It's not so dissimilar from the position that Cloudflare tries to take with its services: it's hard to pick apart what may be people with power trying to uphold ideals even when it is optically poor versus greedy companies intentionally turning a blind eye because it might enrich them. (And yes, I do understand that these sites violate Valve's own ToS, but so does a lot of things on Steam Workshop and elsewhere. In many cases, they really do seem consistently lax as long as there isn't significant external pressure.)
Despite these two things, there is a nagging feeling that every company gives me that I should never take anything but a cynical view on them, because almost all companies are basically lawnmowers now. But I really do not feel like I only give Valve the benefit of the doubt just because they support Linux; I actually feel like Valve has done a substantial amount to prove that they are not just another lawnmower. After all, while they definitely are substantially enriched by tolerating misuse of their APIs, they've probably also gotten themselves into tons of trouble by continuing to have a very hands-off attitude. In fact, it seems like owing to the relatively high standards people have for Valve, they get criticized and punished more for conduct than other companies. I mean seriously, Valve has gotten absolutely reamed for their attempt at adding an arbitration clause into their ToS, with consequences that lingered long after they removed and cancelled the arbitration clause. And I do hate that they even tried it -- but what's crazy to me is that it was already basically standard in big tech licensing agreements. Virtually everyone has an insane "you can't sue us" rule in their ToS. It numbs my mind to try to understand why Valve was one of the first and only companies to face punishment for this. It wouldn't numb my mind at all if it was happening to all of them, but plenty of these arbitration clauses persist today!
So when I consider all of this, I think Valve is an alright company. They're not saints, but even if the bar wasn't so terribly low, they'd probably still be above average overall. That can be true simultaneously with them still having bad practices that we don't all like.
Yes everybody is trying to find rational reasons but to me like in recent politics a lot has to do with irrational tribalism.
I stumbled on an article of Gabe talking about his new yacht[0] and it made me realize he is not different than other billionaire (and maybe worst than average because he doesn’t even give to charity). But he looks like he is "one of us" and he likes Linux, so it’s okay.
Would gamers keep the rose colored glasses if Valve was exactly the same but the CEO was a business suit style type?
[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/17/gabe-newell-leviathan-superya...
It isn't tribalism, at least not from my side. There's a tangible, noticeable, immediate difference between buying a piece of hardware from Valve and buying a piece of hardware from Google or Apple. I really resented Valve after the Steam box debacle that left me with a $1,200 paperweight, but since then, they've done enormous amounts of work to regain my trust through tangible increases in the quality of the gaming experience, including not having to use Windows to game anymore, and providing me with open hardware that I can install whatever I want on, including using their hardware as my own personal PC when e.g. traveling.
Its weird to me that people choose what companies to buy from on the basis of whether or not the CEO owns a yacht or how rich he is. That is not the operative criteria when I choose what products to buy, but rather how well that product suits my needs and how much I trust the relationship with the company that produced it.
Valve is just miles ahead of every other manufacturer in this regard.
The same api users use?
a social chat interface where bots pretend to be humans.
so its a UI not a API yeah
there are worse capitalists to give money to
It's amazing that an always-on DRM company can become the "good guy" by staying the same level of asshole they've always been, while every other company became much worse assholes.
Because in practice that "always-on DRM" is actually just purely an advantage for the customer with zero downsides. It only sounds like you're making a good point when you frame "provides the best shopping and library experience in gaming" in the least charitable way possible. The Valve hate-boner is so weird.
There are disadvantages. e.g. if you don't want to update a program (maybe the new version breaks your modded setup), too bad. Or if you need Windows still for compatibility, it no longer supports Windows 7, so you have to go hunting for old versions of the client and fiddle with it to prevent updates (if that still even works), at which point you'd might as well just mod it to remove the DRM instead.
Basically, it creates a failure point for setups that should otherwise last and be stable several more decades.
> always-on DRM is actually just purely an advantage for the consumer
Look me in the eyes and read this quote to me again. Then think about how yourself from 20 years ago would feel about reading this quote from someone else. You've gone so far down the rabbit hole but you don't realize you're in one.
Yeah I remember PC gaming 20 years ago, it sucked. Thank god Steam exists and made PC a real gaming platform.
DRM is optional on Steam, many games don't have it (or roll their own). In many cases of Steam DRM, activation is only one-time, after that, granted the hardware doesn't change significantly, the player can be offline indefinitely.
I'm no fan or DRM, but the current implementation is far from "always-on".
Their DRM seems to be okay, but they do have some weird bugs.
My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.
It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.
In case you launch the GOG game because of Proton, then I suggest using Heroic launcher to start it instead. You can use Proton there too, automatically downloads and everything, same as Steam. And there will be no clashes with Steam.
You don't need to launch your GOG game via Steam, you can just remove its shortcut from Steam and launch it separately. Then your son can launch and play the Steam game in parallel, so both of you can play coop.
Have you considered exiting Steam before starting the game? Or installing your GOG copy on the other computer?
Steam isn't always-on DRM. For instance Valve's own games don't have any.
Their worst failure is allowing games with Denuvo on their store.
> They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.
You listed one thing. What's the "etc."?
On a personal level I just don't give a shit about the loot crates or cosmetic stuff because I don't buy them, they hold no interest for me, and they typically don't impact gameplay.
I acknowledge that there's a legitimate ethical concern there the same way there is for, say, Magic the Gathering or other card games. But much like MtG, I can't bring myself to be all that upset about it.
>It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - ...
Sounds like we need someone to.. raise the bar.
> They invented loot crates
It looks like false without sources.
What's wrong with hats?
You don't become a billionaire by having your hands clean. But what set them appart to other companies is that they go out of their way not to be hostile to their users.
Loot boxes done well are not user hostile, players pay because they like them, and sure, it uses all the tricks from the gambling industry to get as most money as they can, but player don't feel scammed or considering it an obstacle to their goals. It is just an additional feature they may or may not use. Compare to say, locking part of the game behind a paid DLC, players don't like that, they feel forced. Same end goal, that is to make their money your money, but the latter is considered hostile.
And ads, Steam is full of ads, from recommendations to the store page showing up right as you launch steam. But they won't put a popup between you and your game. They show you the ads you want to see... And you buy games you wouldn't have bought otherwise.
And Steam has DRM, that's weak DRM, but effective at what it does, and importantly, if you bought the games legally, you won't even notice, contrary to some other company intrusive practices.
Steams default landing page can be changed in Settings -> Interface -> Start Up Location. Setting Library skips the store when opening. Steam
The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for.
The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies and centralization cause fragility and maladaptive behavior, autonomous cellular networks are robust and highly adaptive.
For another look at similar principles in action, look up gore-tex and their corporate fragmenting. It's not flat like Valve but it's still kind of genius.
I wish there were more discussion about this stuff in general - society could benefit from having better systems literacy.
> The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat.
I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To be sure, formal procedures can also be window-dressing: it's a balancing act, and not an easy one. I'm just skeptical of ascribing too much benefit to lack of structure.
My understanding is that the emergence of informal hierarchy can actualy be the feature; The problem being addressed being the rigdity of formal hierarchies in a changing environment. As long as informal hierarchies emerge and die according to circumstances, that can be a win.
The point being that the informality arises organically. People are capital-b Bad at risk assessment and planning; we are much, much better at responding to current stimuli.
Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.
With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).
The tyranny of structurelessness
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
This isn't about valve specifically
Also: GitHub before the Microsoft acquisition, as supposedly the teams could self-assemble to work on whatever they wanted.
Thank you for the references; Is there any article/blog describing that secret sauce from the insde for the curious outsider that you would recommand?
I've always been interrested in organisations, but not so much by the theory that I've always found too dry.
The real secret sauce is that Valve is private and doesn't have external investors. As soon as you're owners are primarily interested in short term capital extraction everything else is inevitable.
I think you are correct here. If you want to look at the decline of the US ... this is perhaps a good place to start. Short term capital extraction little long term strategic planning. Maybe Cisco is a good example.. lets move all of our switch hardware production to China and still charge the consumer 3500$ per switch. Equals short term gain, makes lots of millinaires... and then just a few years later.. now Huawei makes excellent switches that are mostly on par with Cisco at a better price point.
yeah this is essentially everything and all this other discussion of corporate structure is irrelevant
Does it really matter if they take these consumer friendly actions because they know it will get them good press and dedicated consumers? The end result is the same.
Like you touched on, for whatever reason, most large enough companies haven't seemed to figure out this obvious truth. I tend to believe it's because it's harder than it looks, once a company reaches a certain size. Now sure, they are by no means perfect, but I'd like to at least give them credit for being far better than any of the competition, no matter the rational behind it.
I dont really know what has happened, but many forces have had to improve Linux kernel incrementally. 15 years ago, linux was terrible at suspend-to-ram, wifi drivers a nightmare. Power efficiency was lagging far behind on most architectures. Everyone from intel, to amd, router vendors, server datacenters and android manufacturers have gradually improved these parts over years and years and now, there seems to be enough vested interest that linux compatibility is not a third afterthought, but having good linux support early means you can launch on a android phone, in the datacenter, or build for a custom SoC.
In reality, Valve is doing all this work on GNU+Linux because they've been afraid of Microsoft ever since Windows 8 and the introduction of the Windows Store. For now, Microsoft is remaining open and isn't restricting installations to its own store; we even see that with the full-screen gaming version of Windows for handhelds, they display games from other stores, including Steam. But Microsoft also has a history of abusing its dominant position and monopoly to push its own products (Internet Explorer, Edge, OneDrive, etc.). Gaben made the only possible decision to protect Valve from that: having their own OS.
You can install your own store or games on the devices if you want to without Steam. You could also take their work and build a custom distro or even a device without any trace of Steam whatsover.
and that's why Gabe's wealth is "only" 10 billion not 100 billion. The problem is many CEOs will look at what Gabe has and think "I want more than him".
No one is hiding anything. No one is pretending to be something they're not. Life is not a Saturday morning cartoon. There are no good guys vs bad guys. There are just businesses trying to earn more profits.
Valve is a business. When Microsoft introduced a Store they threatened Steam's market share. In theory Microsoft could one day update Windows so that it's hard to buy games through non Microsoft stores. Valve responded by investing in open source OS stuff. Their goal is to commoditize Windows, so that Microsoft doesn't wrest control of video game sales away from them. Commoditize your complement is a strategy as old as the software industry itself.
We've known all this for years, it's been discussed publicly and no one is hiding it. It always annoys me when people think we're in Lord of the Rings and one company is Sauron or another is Gandalf. It's all just business. To everyone who makes decisions, it all boils down to numbers on a spreadsheet. They want their number to go up.
What you SHOULD care about is competition. Valve would never have invested in all these OSS technologies if Microsoft hadn't tried to compete with them. They wouldn't be consumer friendly and they wouldn't make investments if they thought they could sit on their ass. They would just coast and enshittify (like Microsoft has in the OS space with its Windows monopoly).
We don't need good guy companies, we need strong pro-competition laws and strong enforcers of those laws. You can vote accordingly at the ballot box, and you can also vote accordingly with your wallet, buy stuff from the little guys.
The discourse is not valve good others bad, rather it is consumer/product focused good and next-quarter/short-term-profit focused bad.
With the context that a lot of modern enshittification, outsourcing, layoffs, anti-consumer practises follow from these short term approaches
Many CEOs are either paid by mythical "shareholder value" or beholden to it in the shape of a board, if they tried to go the valve route they would likely get replaced too soon for the benefits to materialize
They did the thing. Let’s judge their actions (which they have plenty of good and bad)
To modulate your cynical take somewhat, it's remarkable to me that all the devices are completely open. You can install anything you want on them, which makes them more than a storefront. It makes them a device that works for the user, which, to your final point, does create loyalty in people like me.
Other CEOs are not owner-CEOs. They may be founder-CEOs, but at the end of the day those aren't really more powerful than a CEO hired off the street by owners. For publicly traded companies, even a majority stake only makes them powerful on paper, because the 49% selling would shatter their paper net worth.
The other difference (and I think a more important one) is that they take a longer term view of the business, rather than next year's bonus and options vesting. A hired CEO will probably not still be there in a few years time.
> or publicly traded companies, even a majority stake only makes them powerful on paper, because the 49% selling would shatter their paper net worth.
That threat is limited because the other shareholders do not want to reduce the value of their investment either. Look at what a firm of Musk has on Tesla with something like a 15% stake.
Valve is private right? One of the reasons they are not pure evil is because they have the luxury of not needing to chase the magic dragon of inf growth. They can focus on product. Bet your ass if they were public u would see the slimiest shit coming out to eek every possible percent so bonuses are made.
I wish more companies were private for profit but not inf growth.
Came here to write exactly this. IMO it is the big reason what Valve is as a company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From the outside looking in. It really seems like both fields are working around each other in weird ways, somewhat enforced by backwards compatibility and historical path dependence.
The transition from more homogeneous architectures to the very heterogeneous and distributed architectures of today has never really been all that well accounted for, just lots of abstractions that have been papered over and work for the most part. Power management being the most common place these mismatches seem to surface.
I do wonder if it will ever be economical to "fix" some of these lower level issues or if we are stuck on this path dependent trajectory like the recurrent laryngeal nerve in our bodies.
> intentionally hostile kernel interface
If open-sourcing your entire kernel is being "hostile", I don't think that there is or ever was a "friendly" OS.
I think what they were referencing with that is that the kernel hardware interface is unstable, it changes literally every version, which is why you went to upstream it so you don't have to keep it up yourself after that.
In my experience, hardware companies all believe that software is trivial nonsense they don't need to spend any effort on. Consequently, the software that drives their hardware really sucks.
Software can always ship a new update for bugs or features.
Hardware not so much
Software is easier than hardware in general but companies generally pay their hardware guys 25-50% less than their software counterparts
People repeat this line a lot but I don’t think it’s true. Companies like Intel, AMD, Arm, Broadcom, etc. afaik all pay their software folks of equivalent YoE or level roughly the same as their hardware folks. To the extent there’s any difference, it’s much less than 25%.
OTOH, there’s a small slice of (mainly) software companies like Google and Meta, along with Unicorn private companies, that skew the average software engineer salary high. Then there’s a long tail of “old school” hardware companies like TI, Motorola, Atmel, Microchip, and tons of smaller less well known companies that all pay much lower than Google. But they pay their software people poorly as well.
So if you just look at “average software engineer salary” vs “average hardware engineer salary” it appears that SW people are making 50% more than HW people, but it’s not at the same companies.
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.
Wow, super hard disagree, comment here sounds like the typical arrogance hardware engineers face from people in software who've never really done the job or have some superficial experiences.
I won't blindly state "software is easier" but software is definitely easier to modify, iterate and fix, which is why sofware tools and resulting applications can evolve so fast.
I have done both HW & SW, routinely do so, and switch between deep hardware jobs and deep software so I'm qualified to speak.
If you're blinking a light or doing something with Bluetooth you can buy microcontrollers that have this capability and yes that hardware is simple.
But have you ever DESIGNED a microcontroller, let alone a modern processor or complex system ?
Getting something "simple" like a microcontroller to reliably start-up involves complex power sequencing, making sure an oscillator works, a phase-locked-loop that behaves correctly and that's just "to make a clock signal run at a frequency" we're not talking about implementing PCIe Gen5 or RDMA over 100Gbps Ethernet.
Hardware engineers definitely welcome better tools but the cost of using an unproven tool or tool that might have "a few" corner cases resulting in your $5-million SoC not working is a hard risk to tolerate, so sadly(and to our pain) we end up using proven but arcane infrastructure.
Software in contrast can evolve faster because you can "fix it in software". New tools can be readily tested, iterated on and deployed.
> But have you ever DESIGNED a microcontroller
Yes... But in fairness I was just talking about the digital RTL, not the messy analogue stuff (PLLs, power/reset, etc.) I've never done that.
> but software is definitely easier to modify, iterate and fix,
Definitely true.
> which is why sofware tools and resulting applications can evolve so fast.
Not sure I agree here though. It seems to me that EDA tools evolve super slowly because a) hardware engineers are timid old fogies who never want to learn anything new, and b) the big three have a monopoly on tooling.
What do you think about Atopile? I'm not a hardware person yet, but these seem similar.
PCB and RTL are completely separate disciplines.
Come to think of it, for them it is basically customer support.
Most will want to outsource it as cheap as possible and/or push it to the community. They won't care if it takes an eternity for the customer to get their issues solved as long as new customers keep buying.
And a few companies will see an opportunity to bring better customer care as an advantage and/or integrate it in their philosophy.
And it's the reason why for several years I didn't consider buying anything that had an AMD card (not now, but for many many years it was insanity).
Are you talking about the FGLRX drivers on Linux desktops?
Or their Windows driver quality back then?
I remember them both being pretty brutal.
The linux desktop was my reason.
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.
I would recommend the Anbernic RG353M running ROCKNIX, or for a more powerful device, Retroid's Pocket 5 running ROCKNIX. Most other options have awful software support and are just e-waste, unfortunately.
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.
I also just love that in open source you can call something “Turnip” because you’re not marketing it to anyone.
There isn't a single mention of AI in the article.
I don't know, Turnip's a cute name and I wouldn't think twice before buying a product which is branded that way (as long as the actual product is cool of course!).
Glad too see that while Qualcomm tries to keep things closed shut tightly, Valve and their contractors are trying to do the opposite.
Every major company open sources software that is not part of its core competitive advantages. It’s part of “commoditizing your complements”
Exactly this. What incentive does Qualcomm have to open source their code? Or NVidia, for that matter. And what are the risks?
OSS isn't this caricature good-vs-evil situation people sometimes imagine, it is all about economic incentives.
Qualcomm's Vulkan drivers are hot garbage, so I'm not surprised Turnip was seen as more desirable. I work with mobile GPUs for <AAA Engine>, have direct contacts with Qualcomm, and the drivers still find ways to disappoint even with my low expectations.
> I work with mobile GPUs for <AAA Engine>, have direct contacts with Qualcomm, and the drivers still find ways to disappoint even with my low expectations.
Often when people run into problems with a GPU they blame "the drivers". How confident are you that the problems you ran into originated from the drivers, and not from other sources, such as the hardware itself? Just because an issue goes away with a driver update it doesn't mean that the problem originated in the driver -- most of the time what happens is that they found a hardware bug and implemented yet another software workaround.
I am not throwing the HW folks under the bus, either. The hardware is immensely complex and it's not that they can release a new revision every month.
One of the main responsibilities of GPU drivers is working around the bugs that are found after hardware is released. That, and getting all the blame.
I suppose from the outside I cant meaningfully distinguish from hardware or software bugs except in a few cases. Doesn't change the outcome for us either, it's not like we can rely on driver updates to be shipped on Android. Many extensions are broken like extended dynamic state to the point of being unusable. We've hit plenty of issues in the driver shader compiler too, even in Vulkan 1.0 features like relaxed precision.
We've hit a ton of bugs on the adreno 830, with even basic stuff like barriers being broken.
The problem isn't exclusive to Qualcomm fwiw, we've run into plenty of bugs in ARM's driver. Apple's too
Yeah, I get where you are coming from. The inability to send you timely driver patches was a paint point for us, too.
Android has entire API for handling driver failures:
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Wif...
Hardware can have issues, but firmware and drivers usually work around those issues. When firmware and drivers crash, you get "masterpieces" like the one above.
I used to write drivers for Qualcomm GPUs. I am speaking from years of experience here.
Qualcomm is by a lot of accounts on HN a law firm with a side hustle of selling chips.
Worked there for 9 years, can confirm. I wish that our drivers had been open sources, because we poured our souls into them and took pride in the result.
It's actually very easy for skilled people to deliver good products when they aren't just tasked with sucking off shareholders. Public trade of companies makes them worse every time.
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.
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).
Taking games designed for desktop GPUs and running them on mobile GPUs with tile-based-deferred-rendering hardware will be a disaster. Mobile GPU designs will choke on modern games as they're designed around hardware features that mobile GPUs either don't have, or that run very slowly.
Peak theoretical throughput for the GPUs you find in ARM SoCs is quite good compared to the power draw, but you will not get peak throughput for workloads designed for Nvidia and AMD GPUs.
Isn't the GPU on Apple Silicon machines a tile-based "mobile" GPU design? Many of the hardware features that traditional GPU's have and mobile GPU's lack can be easily "faked" with GPU-side general compute.
But even the most powerful apple silicon GPU is terrible compared to an average Nvidia chip
While I agree with the general point, this statement is factually incorrect - apple's most powerful laptop GPU punches right about the same as the laptop SKU of the RTX 4070, and the desktop Ultra variant punches up with a 5070ti. I'd say on both fronts that is well above the average.
There is no world where Apple silicone is competing with a 5070ti on modern workloads. Not the hardware and certainly not the software where Nvidia DLSS is in it's own air with AMD just barely having gotten AI upscaling out and started approximating ray reconstruction.
Certainly, nobody would buy an Apple hoping to run triple-A PC games.
But among people running LLMs outside of the data centre, Apple's unified memory together with a good-enough GPU has attracted quite a bit of attention. If you've got the cash, you can get a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. So there's one workload where apple silicon gives nvidia a run for their money.
Only in the size of model it can run, not speed of token generation.
Apple's MetalFX upscaler is pretty similar to DLSS (and I think well ahead of AMD's efforts on this front).
Ray tracing outside of Nvidia is a disaster all round, so yeah, nobody is competing on that front.
Ray tracing support on the newest AMD chips is getting good enough. They are still behind Nvidia but definitely not a disaster anymore
Are there real world game benchmarks for this or are these synthetic tests?
And it will consume almost as much power as the Nvidia GPU to do so.
That simply isn't true. I have an RTX 4070 gaming PC and an M4 MacBook Pro w/ 36GB shared memory. When models fit in VRAM, the RTX 4070 still runs much faster. Maybe the next generation M5 chips are faster but they can't be 2-4x faster.
Snapdragon doesn't do tile based deferred rendering the way Apple does (or did). Snapdragon does (or did) a form of tile-based rendering, but it is a completely different design, with completely different performance tradeoffs.
What about the Switch 2 (nVidia's Tegra) line? The one in the Swich 2 is using Ampere architecture.
That should be feasible, no?
Linux support is in a terrible state for Nvidia chips. Not going to happen.
You don't have to use tile-based rendering on these chips anymore. They can directly draw to the entire screen.
You can, but the immediate mode path is slower and uses significantly more power. Mobile GPUs are not good at modern desktop game workflows where significant portions of the frame are compute shaders. They're generally very memory bandwidth starved, and general compute sidesteps most of the optimizations the hardware has made to work around this.
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.
Apple not sharing their chips extends to Apple keeping their grip on the higher density nodes.
I wonder if it's still the case, but for a while Apple was buying the totality of TSMC's capacity for 3nm nodes, leaving the rest of the world with only 4nm+ chips to grab.
Bitmain is quite often first on new nodes, ahead of Apple, even.
You don’t need to wonder. Top of the lines Snapdragon, Dimensity and Exinos SoC all use 3nm.
Amusingly, it’s the second time in two days I have this discussion here and I have noticed that a lot of people, who I think are American and using Apple phones by default, are completely unaware of what the mobile SoC landscape looks like nowadays. Apple lead doesn’t exist anymore as of this generation.
Apple still leads in raw performance. Their M5 is far ahead of basically everything in single-core performance. AFAIK it's because their architecture prioritizes IPC over frequency, and they can spend the entire silicon budget on a very large monolithic chip.
Current gen ARM is pretty strong - for an example, the switch 2 runs on ARM and it's decently more powerful than the current steam deck.
Yes, the Nvidia GPU in the Switch 2 is more powerful. But not the ARM CPU.
The existence of Nvidia DLSS (upscaling and frame generation) alone is a huge advantage over the Steam Deck, too. The Deck can't use DLSS because it's Nvidia only, AMD FSR isn't as good, and the latest FSR isn't even supported (officially) on the SoC.
Why couldn’t they have an AMD GPU and an ARM CPU?
What would that do? Power consumption would mainly come from the GPU because these devices are for gaming.
Does something like that exist on the AMD side?
You're basically describing nVidia's Tegra line. The latest is in the Switch 2 I believe.
Samsungs newer Exynos are somewhat like this, their GPUs are based on AMDs RNA2.
> There are no ARM chips with enough power.
Disagree.
Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have mobile SoC which are more performant than the M2 and the X2 Elite is in the ballpark of Apple top SoC.
Considering how I currently use my Steam Deck, there is nothing my current phone couldn’t do. Sure, you won’t get PS5 performance but I’m personally completely happy with Switch 2 level performance.
> Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have mobile SoC which are more performant than the M2 and the X2 Elite is in the ballpark of Apple top SoC.
At what power consumption? And is that both CPU and GPU, or just GPU?
Do you mean there's no ARM chips that they can buy? Surely the ARM chips in Apple's devices are powerful enough aren't they?
You can’t buy an M3 chip on its own
Why can’t someone else make one?
That’s very much the trick. Apple is actually exceptionally good at making CPUs. Look at these single-thread benchmarks: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ Similarly, if you look for the M4 in this list and then look for other ARM chips, you’ll have to look quite a ways down the list: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/mobile
It’s baffling to me that no one else (Qualcomm) has not been able to come close.
My guess is that CPU design is existential for Apple, and no one else cares enough to be dedicated enough to do what Apple has done.
This is exactly what happens when you invest billions and hire the best industry specialists for decades. M-series processors did not magically appear out of nowhere. Apple perfected them for years in iPhones, but people didn't have the ability to compare since Apple doesn't share their processors with anyone.
Because it’s a proprietary design? You’d have to reverse-engineer the whole chip, which is really hard to do on that process node
Giving them some credit, I think they're asking "why isn't there a close competitor" and that takes a much more involved answer.
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...
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.
AYN Thor looks quite promising in that category https://www.ayntec.com/products/ayn-thor
It’s an ARM machine running SteamOS.
Your link says it runs Android?
You're right, I was mistaken, I've seen some Youtubers playing games on it, but they use GameHub to run Steam games, somehow I thought it was running Steam OS.
Sorry for the confusion.
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).
Retroid Pocket 5 supports Android and Linux dual boot.
Like an IPad mini?
Well, apparently there's this project I learned about literally yesterday! https://portmaster.games/games.html
There are handhelds for less than 200$ with very good screens and controls that can play all of these. Not to mention stream (via Steam or other software) from your PC!
Just my thinking, they'll release a "Steam Deck Mini" that's more in line with other current ARM based gaming handhelds like the Ayn Odin.
You already have one, it's your phone. Winlator can run x86 games, you only need to attach a controller grip.
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
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.
Why not just make a performant ARM device? Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.
> Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.
Kinda. Apple silicon sips power when it isn't being used, but under a heavy gaming load it's pretty comparable to AMD. People report 2 hours of battery life playing cyberpunk on Macs, which matches the steam deck. It's only in lighter games where Apple pulls ahead significantly, and that really has nothing to do with it being ARM.
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.
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.
This doesn't feel like anything Apple has done in modern times. The last thing I remember them licensing was the iPod+HP from 2004-2005. Apple barely does enterprise support; they're very focused on selling their products to consumers and I don't think they're at all interested in selling CPUs to others.
Apple waffles and sometimes talks about gaming on Macs, but they lack the commitment that is needed. A lot of people like to buy a game and continue playing it for years, even after the developer went on to something else; or to buy years old games on sale. But you can't expect to run a mac os app compiled three to five years ago that is media and gpu heavy intensive on today's mac os. There will have been mandatory developer updates and it won't work.
Win32 is the only stable desktop ABI... and games need a stable ABI.
The Nintendo Switch already provides >160 million reasons for gamedevs to care about native ARM support, 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 relatively tiny potential market owned by a company which is actively hostile to the needs of game developers.
The switch is underpowered to the point that most A(AA) games cannot run on it without a ton of effort and compromise, an M chip powered device would be a different story. But anyway it's never going to happen, just daydreaming about a perfect gaming setup...
Valve isn't in the position to make their own best-in-class ARM chips like Apple is. They'd have to find a vendor which can sell them the chip they need.
Which SoC on the market do you think fits the bill?
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.
Maybe, but I think it's more about the millions of ARM devices already deployed: android phones
I have seen no signs there are any real GPU alternatives for ARM
That would make no sense, translation would use more power than the architecture difference
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.
Igalia benchmarked against EEVDF https://youtu.be/wQbiqKUIsMI?si=rT-zMXJkVR6RYG_D&t=2353
Also bazzite uses LAVD by default for steam deck hardware https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/bazzite-buzz-18/379...
EEVDF is not BORE. Well, technically BORE is something wrapped around either CFS or EEVDF. Interestingly enough, specifically for high sustained load situations (which handhelds are likely to hit given their limited power budget), the CFS version of BORE actually performs better than the EEVDF version.
And Bazzite used to use BORE, they just like tracking upstream as much as possible.
Anywho who is to say, maybe LAVD is indeed better. We don't know.
> Much better than AMD, Intel or Nvidia.
My impression is that Nvidia still leads in power-efficiency when compared node-for-node. The Switch 2 is a miracle beyond anything Apple or AMD ever did with 8nm silicon.
Everyone else is shipping less power-efficient raster hardware unless you're super pedantic about idle draw.
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. :)
Not just that, but the whole concept of an open source consultancy is fascinating. I love that this exists and is a career for some people.
Same feeling here! I never really dug much into the low level graphics side of thing.
"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
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.
> “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
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.
There's already a ton of Snapdragon based handheld consoles, they're mainly marketed for retro system emulation but you can do whatever you want on them. They usually run Android out of the box though, not plain Linux.
And in fact, are able to play Windows games already with Winlator or GameHub. Performance is getting impressive as well, with newer chips like the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
Not sure where they are now, but a year or two ago compatibility with all but the most basic games was quite bad (because of the GPU).
GTA V is running at high preset locked 60fps via GameHub on the Ayn Thor which has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMIPlwoAt58#t=14m41s
Some powerful retro handhelds support Linux loading, such as: Retroid Pocket 5, Mini, and Flip 2 on the five-year-old SD865, and more recently, Ayn Odin 2 (original, Mini, and Portal) on the three-year-old SD8 Gen 2 (which is one version lower than the SoC in Steam Frame (SD8 Gen 3)).
So if we get a native arm version of Steam and Proton ARM64EC, we will essentially already have mini Steam Deck(s), and since you want something similar to a PSP, you can check out the Ayn Odin 2 Mini, it's similar to the PS Vita, but I'm not sure if it's still available for sale, or you can order the Retroid Pocket 6 (available in a few months), which has the same chip, but a better screen and is also small in size.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Steam states that you can simply run the x86-64 Steam client under emulation, in FEX-Emu or Box64. Results on existing mobile hardware seem promising already.
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.
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.
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 :-).
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.
It's a great device, I mainly use it for emulation. The fact that it's properly an open platform is amazing.
This is my experience. I played some Xbox here and there and every once in a while fell down the Factorio hole but I wasn’t gaming a ton. I got the steam deck somewhat cause it was cool, and somewhat as retail therapy but now I play it almost every night. I love playing smaller indie games on it, it’s a great device. Compare that to my Switch 2 and I’ve played it about 1/100th of the time I’ve played on the Deck. The Switch 2 is nice and all, just the Deck is way more flexible.
Replaying my favorite GBA/DS/etc games again on the Deck was so much fun. Huge screen for my (older) eyes, ability to speed up/rewind/save slots, and other tweaks if I wanted were all a blast. I played back through some of my favorites as a kid and enjoyment and nostalgia were both off the charts.
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.
Apologies if you've already ruled this out, but hand pain is very often caused by strain/injury from further up the arms, the shoulders, or even the neck. You may find that pulling your shoulders back or relaxing them, or adjusting your arm posture, or straightening/relaxingyour neck gives you less pain while playing.
Maybe you need larger controllers ?
Also possible the touchpads are better for fatigue than joysticks
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.
> Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.
That's a mark against the Beelink for many :)
I was looking at buying a Beelink NAS and paying for a Windows license when I'm just going to install proxmox on it (I think) definitely counts against it.
I wouldn't worry about it. The cost OEMs pay for those Windows licenses is negligible for a "low-end" device like a simple NAS box.
> 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.
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.
Valve–Roku merger. Someone buys a Steam Machine that they keep in the living room for both general purpose computering and as an HTPC that never, ever runs a game purchased from the Steam store, but they still make money. Easy peasy.
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".
They could offer a $X steam credits with their steam hardware for a win win.
they're already effectively doing this by selling the deck at a loss
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".
It's a somewhat justified fear - the box screams 'home server' to me. Then again a Mac Mini is just $600
The steam machine is a $350 server + a $300 GPU + a $200 controller. A good deal for $500-$700, but only if you want the GPU and controller.
Something else worth considering in comparison to consoles is that the games you buy on the Steam machine can be played on other devices and they'll be available long after the games you bought on console this generation EOL.
I've wasted $1000+ on console games over the years that I don't have access to anymore, yet I can still install the first Steam game I bought decades ago.
The Steam Machine doesn't come with the Steam controller, though, as far as I know.
Two options with controller and without. Two options for memory 512gb and 2tb. 4 skews.
Ahh OK, thanks.
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.
But maybe I'll use them!
Well, you did state “just to support their OSS efforts”. ;)
The pleasurable after the useful!
Steam gift cards
That’s what happens when you don’t need to please the shareholders.
Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open source work.
Valve employs like <400 people
They seem to be skimping out on their contributions to FFmpeg.
Google has contributed many patches to ffmpeg. Valve has contributed 0 as far as I am aware.
They aren't. Sometimes headlines are misleading.
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.
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.
I'd like to see that comparison tracking the number of devs and how much open source software each company uses.
That's very true, and I didn't realize it until you just said it.
If you think publicly-held companies are bad, wait until you see what private equity gets up to.
Okay, but have you heard about the monarchy?
I'm staring at the EOL of Windows 10, which I use on my game machine. I'll happily get one of the cubes for my next box. I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage.
You did say "I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage." Even so, if you're not ready to move tomorrow, you can give up some privacy for the next year and continue to get patches by logging in to Microsoft. Windows 10 LTSC is a possibility if you somehow qualify for a license, although there's no guarantee the latest Nvidia drivers will work on it, some version of them will, or you can punt and run Linux on your current PC until the steam cube comes out. Pick a Linux distribution you like and run Steam, or go down the rabbit hole of running native Steam OS.
I personally preferred Fedora for this but mostly because my employer is a redhat shop. It's not otherwise (as far as I know) any better or worse than any other distro for gaming.
I game exclusively on my Linux desktop (for the few games I play). Everything works flawlessly with Proton.
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.
For a few years before I eventually got a Steam Deck, I played a lot of games that I bought outside of Steam, and over the past decade, the experience of doing this on Linux has massively improved. Plenty of their improvements get upstreamed to Wine, and there's nothing stopping you from obtain proton (or even one of the various unofficial tweaks of it) to run games that you don't buy through Steam to get the benefits that aren't upstreamed (or haven't been yet). The article itself mentions that they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm.
It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey by saying the Steam Deck being the only product they have that supports the open source vision. The Steam Deck is the only new hardware product they've had since 2019, when they released their original first party VR headset that presumably is being replaced by the new one. Other than that, the only other hardware products they've ever worked on were earlier headsets made by other manufacturers or the previous iterations of the other two products announced alongside the new headset. From that standpoint, you could make a credible argument that the only product they even have right now that benefits from the open source work they've done in the past six years they did is the exact one you say supports this vision.
Exactly they have no track record so the benefits remain to be seen how gaming improvements to Linux are advantageous to people who use FOSS beyond paying Valve for Steam DRM’d games without requiring a Windows license.
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.)
They run their own Gitlab instance with many more steamos projects:
What do you mean by "open source the Machine"? Valve has stated its a regular open PC. The whole driver stack is open.
The hardware, like they did with the Steam Deck.
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.
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.
Valve paying for the development of KDE, Wine and adjacent projects is beneficial for FOSS.
Adjacent projects to those have if anything only eroded the credit is where credits due. Ask any non-technically inclined Steam Deck owner who contributed to Linux to make it desktop useable and people will tell you desktop computing wasn’t possible until Valve did something. Valve does a very good job scrubbing the OS to look like Steam OS and not Wine, KDE, or Arch.
So while their adjacent projects have moved users to Linux, it is not the reason the desktop is a good experience.
Again Valve’s contributions have been mainly beneficial for Valve. They are perfectly comfortable taking money from Windows and Linux users and claiming to fight some sort of freedom of technology war, but the benefits for wider non-entertainment computing remain to be seen.
So proud to see a Spanish company working on this low-level stuff
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.
If you want to "accelerate the Desktop Android merge" you need devices to be properly supported in the mainline kernel and Mesa stack, which is what everyone uses on desktop. This is what Valve is doing. Google may be merging Android and ChromeOS, but even ChromeOS is far from a true "desktop"-class OS.
I'm pretty sure "Desktop Android" is a version of Android that runs on laptops, not a version of normal desktop Linux that can run Android.
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"
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."
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.
Steam DRM is entirely optional. Blame the publishers for DRM.
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.
They are more of a co-op than a company btw.
Wonder if later they will get to do WebXR Browser work for Linux / this hardware too.
I wonder if they(valve) sponsor servo
I don’t see why that would interest them.
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.
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.
Not sure if this is what you had in mind: Projected 2D views into a 3D "movie screen" environment is a feature of the Frame, per my understanding of their marketing, and of early reviewers' experiences.
If you meant, "do they take 2D render frames from videogames and convert them into pseudo-3d or actual 3d where the user can tilt their head to see a different view INTO the 2D game's universe, e.g. see behind bushes just by tilting head", then "no".
I mean, you don't need to go THAT far, regular 3DTVs didn't have that capability. But the possibility is there for fixed-position 3D.
Stereoscopy is definitely possible, but it would be hard to hack it in without developer cooperation. I don't really see it happening for most flatscreen titles.
FWIW though, SteamVR already supports playing non-VR games on a "projected" display using any regular headset. It's not exclusive to the Frame, nor a future feature!
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!
VITURE's Immersive 3D already offers this for several platforms (for VITURE glasses).
You mean like VorpX?
I mean like an official Valve fork of VorpX that works just as well as Proton. I have not had the best experiences with VorpX. But it becomes a much easier problem if you have standardized hardware and software.
VorpX is closed source so not a fork. Seems like they could do things at the driver level.
Cool！