[teroshan]

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe [1]

> Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor. With 16GB of RAM, Steam Frame supports stand-alone play on a growing number of both VR and non-VR games without needing to stream from your PC.

So Steam + Proton works on aarch64? Is this something already available/supported, or is this an announcement?

[1] Steam Frame, which is the VR Headset releasing alongside the Steam Machine. Dedicated discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325

[jsheard]

Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now.

https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...

[radialstub]

I believe this work is a continuation of the work the asahi linux people did to get games working on M-series macs. It seems Alyssa Rosenzweig works at valve as a contractor. Super cool work. Some seriously talented folks.

[LeonM]

Alyssa works for Intel now, so I doubt she'll be doing much contract work for Valve anymore...

[embedding-shape]

What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.

[trenchpilgrim]

On her website it says she is working on GPU drivers there - I wouldn't be surprised if that's something she greatly enjoys and Intel gave her then opportunity to work on official, production shipping drivers instead of reverse engineered third party drivers.

[neilv]

If I were Intel, this sounds like a great person to give an R&D skunkworks dream job.

Potential lottery ticket win, they are available for consulting internally anywhere that can add value, and they're not working for anyone else.

[whizzter]

Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real.

[array_key_first]

Personally I don't think ARM can make x86 irrelevant.

I believe low wattage SOCs can make traditional desktop hardware irrelevant (ish), but I think ARM is orthogonal to that.

[forgotoldacc]

I imagine there's also some challenging work that would be fun to dig into. Being the person who can clean up Intel's problems would be quite a reputation to have.

[sulam]

There’s a real limit on what level of problem one engineer can fix, regardless of how strong they are. Carmack at Meta is an example of this, but there are many. Woz couldn’t fix Apple’s issues, etc.

A company sufficiently scaled can largely only be fixed by the CEO, and often not even then.

[ikety]

I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.

[bigyabai]

Would it shock you to hear that many/most engineers don't pick an employer based on brand reputation?

[collingreen]

Would it shock you to hear that famous engineers with their own personal brand power have different opportunities and motivations than many/most engineers?

[KerrAvon]

usually a combination of money/benefits/locale is the answer to this question

[skavi]

Intel has a reputation of producing relatively high quality drivers for Linux.

[gregorvand]

write up on that here: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html

[Yokolos]

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493

This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:

> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.

> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.

It's mentioned in this issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8136 which was closed Oct 2024 with this comment by kisak-valve:

> Hello @Theleafir1, similar to #1493, this is not a realistic objective for Proton any time in the near future.

[baq]

Finally some clarification on what valve time actually is.

[mosselman]

What do you mean? Could you share your insight?

[dmonitor]

it's running joke that Valve will announce something as "coming soon" only to release months or years later

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

[AlienRobot]

This kind of thing is what makes me trust Valve.

[firen777]

>"Coming Soon" (January 10, 2017) | December 20, 2024 | 7th Issue of Team Fortress Comics: The Days Have Worn Away

Out of all the IPs Valve owns, somehow it's TF2 that got a story conclusion and it couldn't have been more perfect.

[amarant]

Did someone say half life 3?

[yvdriess]

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

[teroshan]

Valve deciding to support Arm-based gaming is HUGE news

[derefr]

There was also a parallel effort to this end, targeting Android rather than plain Linux, resulting in an app called https://winlator.org/ — which also works quite well at this point. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0yUqcyY18)

[pippy360]

That was a very higher quality YT video. It's clearly written by someone who knows when they're talking about even though it's mostly non-technical

[throawayonthe]

nowadays FEX works better than box86 in my experience, on 'desktop' linux at least

[pdpi]

Have to wonder if there is a world where Proton comes to macOS.

[jsheard]

Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.

[GeekyBear]

> Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan.

You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.

On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.

[jsheard]

Valve could implement a separate Metal backend for Proton, what I'm saying is they probably wouldn't want to spend their resources on that.

[derefr]

Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.

[samtheprogram]

That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.

I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.

The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.

[alessandroberna]

They could also use MoltenVK

[jakogut]

As far as I understand, there's actually an intermediate driver on macOS that implements Vulkan on top of Metal, similar to how Proton implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan.

The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.

[yAak]

https://www.lunarg.com/lunarg-at-xdc-2025-kosmickrisp-overvi...

[miohtama]

Wouldn't it be Apple's benefit to get more gaming on MacOS? Their goals might align with Steam.

Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it.

[WhyNotHugo]

Valve seems to break free form depending on someone else’s walled garden.

Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden.

Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software.

[evilduck]

Hard to swallow.

Every day I sit down at a Mac for work and proceed to launch VS Code, Zed, Outlook, DBeaver, Excel, Teams, LogSeq, Syncthing, Chrome, Firefox, LM Studio and Docker. I prefer MacOS but basically all of my application workflow exists for Windows verbatim and if using browser versions of the MS apps, on Linux too.

[poulpy123]

Apple is big enough to not need gaming and their philosophy is to have the most control possible on their ecosystem and to be the most closed possible. For them it makes no sense to encourage steam to be big on mac (except as a way to jumpstart their own system before closing it). And it is especially true now that steam is making machines, so is a direct competitor

[sgentle]

DXMT has been advancing very quickly: https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt

[pdpi]

True, forgot about that. That said, Apple does have D3DMetal. A man can dream that they eventually opensource that.

[easyThrowaway]

I mean, theoretically they could backport the D3DMetal wine driver from the Game Porting Toolkit. Also I remember there was some early preliminary work done on stock wine a few years ago.

Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times.

[philo23]

I believe that was part of the original plan for Proton, but with the success of the Steam Deck that got shelved and it moved to a focus purely on Linux.

I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment.

CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory.

[GeekyBear]

Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux.

The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.

Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.

[pdpi]

I mentioned elsewhere — Right now, using Wine/Crossover is a hassle. Wanting "Proton on Mac" isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.

[bsimpson]

I did catch that the streaming stick for the Valve Frame in the announcement video was plugged into a computer that looked an awful lot like a Mac.

[ENGNR]

Yes! I rewound the video to double check

But honestly at this point I’m destined to buy a Steam Machine despite having a hefty Mac that could do gaming if only it were possible. Valve have been amazing about open computing and Apple are basically the enemy at this point.

It makes me wonder about what using steam machine for all computing might look like, as the new home of open computing and gaming.

[bsimpson]

I wonder if the video team uses Mac, and just shot a quick clip with the closest USB port on hand.

[Bombthecat]

Damn valve is cooking.

[stetrain]

Just to clarify that's for the Steam Frame VR Headset. The Steam Machine PC uses an AMD Zen 4 x86 CPU.

[SpaceNoodled]

The headset isn't natively running games, right?

[smileybarry]

It can, but it'll be a small subset of stuff. You'll probably be able to just hit install + play on most things, but it'll have a "Steam Frame Verified" program like the Steam Deck's.

[stetrain]

Yes, in the same way that a Quest 3 can run BeatSaber and other similar calibre games.

For more demanding games it's designed to stream from a PC.

[jasonjmcghee]

Wow this looks great. Foveated streaming, great resolution, wireless, 144hz, looks much more comfortable... As much as I want this, I feel like it'll end up being a really cool thing that just sits on the shelf.

Edit: foveated streaming, not rendering

[Sohcahtoa82]

It looks good until I reached one bit:

> Passthrough - Monochrome passthrough via outward facing cameras

This is an outright bone-headed move that I can't believe Valve is making. Only having monochrome cameras means augmented reality is basically a non-starter.

AR has a lot of potential. I literally bought a Meta Quest 3 just for PianoVision [0] when I already had a Valve Index. I would love to see some sort of AR-based game you could play outdoors. But with only monochrome vision, that's gonna be awful.

[0] https://youtu.be/apwZTV-Rg0s

[starkparker]

The videos I've seen about the Frame all call out the front expansion port, which "Valve says ... offers a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface and also supports a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port for other peripherals."[1]

That's plenty to support color passthrough as a physical addon, which in turn makes me think that, like with the OLED Deck, we'll see a Frame with built-in color-passthrough later as a different premium SKU when/if they justify it.

1: https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-official-announce...

[terribleperson]

I expect that a premium headset is in the works, but they probably didn't want to complicate what is effectively a console launch with multiple SKUs. They'll probably offer a 'Frame Pro' with wider FOV and better cameras a year or two down the line, possibly at the same time as the Steam Deck refresh we all know is coming.

[pteraspidomorph]

I'm led to believe there's only so much FOV you can get out of pancake lenses? This is already spoecced to be the best pancake FOV seen to this date.

[terribleperson]

It's conceivable they could opt for better fidelity over more FOV (this would certainly support the 'play 2d games on your headset' push), but I wouldn't put it past Valve to be experimenting with alternative lens designs.

[terribleperson]

AR is really cool but it seems like a better fit for premium VR headsets right now. At a given price and assuming other specs are fixed, monochrome cameras offer higher refresh rate. I'm hoping this will help the frame offer better tracking.

[samplatt]

Sad fact is that nobody outside tiny niche-cases in engineering really gives a shit about XR. The current round of meta-branded glasses don't have features worth the price.

When it's light & small enough to be a pair of glasses and more than just the expensive but limited gimmick that the form is currently, then it'll be world-changing. It's close, but it's not there yet.

[oblio]

The thing is, Google Glass was announced in 2013, 13 years ago. Yes, hardware and software advancements have been huge in the meantime but the form factor is so restrictive that we're probably still 10 years away from the "iPhone moment" of XR/AR. Especially since hardware is in a weird place where all the cutting edge stuff is more or less made by a single company.

[cardanome]

To be fair, I have zero interest in AR so I am glad I will not have to pay for it when buying the headset.

PianoVision sounds like a really bad way to learn the piano. There are already pianos/midi controller that have the abilities to light up the keys you are supposed to play if you really needed that. But that is a gimmick that you might use the first few sessions and then never again. Same with PianoVision.

Generally, is is so much better to start with music notation from day one. I regret starting with all the piano learning apps because they only have been holding me back.

[luqtas]

some just want to play Here Comes the Sun and not learn proper technique to go above grade 8 esoteric stuff without feeling pain bc they are playing for hours a day

[koolala]

Has PianoVision been working for you to learn piano?

[grafporno]

> AR has a lot of potential

Name one that has to do with with this box competing with xbox and playstation in people's living room.

[hnuser123456]

I recommend preparing a drink or two and loading up VRchat and joining one of the rave club groups. Check out the metaverse zuck wishes he ran.

[qwm]

VRChat is one of the most socially dysfunctional online platforms I've ever used

[Andrex]

I haven't ventured in myself but I love reading people's anecdotes if you got any handy.

[grepex]

I could see Steam creating the OASIS

[darkwater]

Any idea if Gabe likes Rush?

[embedding-shape]

I tried VRChat once or twice but never seemed to have found any fun places/groups to hang out that weren't obsessing about anime/manga most of the time. Anyone here on HN have better suggestions of worlds/groups or where to even look?

[hnuser123456]

There are groups that are more focused on music (DnB, dubstep, other festival-friendly genres), focused on dancing, focused on drinking games, focused on world-hopping, etc. I'm into the underground rave vibe, so for that there's VRC Party Hub, which is a guy who runs a discord who befriends as many clubs as he can find in that scene, and imports their schedules/announcements channels into a nightly report of all known events.

https://x.com/VRChatPartyHub

[pimeys]

My NVIDIA Shield is getting old and slow. I can see this as a good replacement, because it supports HDMI CEC, so you can control it with your remote control.

Install Plex, JellyFin, FreeTube et.al. to it and you have a nice open source TV box.

You also get 4k gaming from Steam, GOG, Epic etc. and you get emulators. I've been wanting to build a computer like this, but CEC is hard to find and the adapters that exist don't support full 4k resolution.

[matthewrobertso]

The specs for this steam machine say HDMI 2.0, in the past I used a pulse8 HDMI CEC USB dongle with a computer which was also HDMI 2.0 iirc. I was using a 1080p projector with it but their website claims 4k support: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

I recently replaced a shield with an Ugoos Am6b+ running coreELEC, which works okay and supports some stuff the shield doesn't but I miss being able to run some android apps easily. I wonder if the new steam machine will support DV.

[pimeys]

https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

> Does not support resolutions and colour spaces greater than 4k60 4:2:0 8-bit colour.

This is kind of annoying if you want 4k60 4:4:4 and 10-bit HDR.

[matthewrobertso]

If you want that you won't want this steam machine, HDMI 2.0 can do 4K60 HDR at 10-bit, but only with chroma subsampling (4:2:2 or 4:2:0) (not full 4:4:4).

[erxam]

Maybe they've cracked the code with the dongle? Usually, you either have to invest both time and money into setting up the perfect streaming network, deal with annoying cables or resign yourself to inferior on-device game versions. The ergonomics matter more than you'd think.

But if it's a very easy plug-n-play type deal to run SteamVR games (and on Linux!), that's a huge ergonomic improvement. Don't have to think too much about whether everything is running correctly or what-have-you.

[mavamaarten]

If it's just plug and play and works well, it'd be brilliant. I have experimented a lot with a couple or wifi dongles I had lying around and setting up a hotspot, but honestly I could never get it to work well.

Streaming VR content is just so sensitive. I have a good cabled network but even a simple switch introduced noticeable lag spikes. In the end I have a separate router that I just connect straight to my PC, and then I share my wifi connection through my PC to that network. A whole silly setup just to minimize latency and packet loss. If that could be replaced with a simple USB dongle I'd be amazed.

[Hikikomori]

Bought another AP to use on 6ghz band, still alone there, works perfectly for my oculus. If they can do it with a dongle that would make it much simpler for regular people.

[jauntywundrkind]

I don't think there is foveated rendering. There is foveated encoding, when game streaming.

Looks like a very competent headset indeed though! Nice combo of fast streaming that can prioritize well with foveated encoding, and hopefully a pretty nice malleable capable standalone headset too.

[terribleperson]

The eye tracking data is supposedly being made available to other software on PC (and presumably the headset as well), so foveated rendering should be possible but is a software problem.

[jasonjmcghee]

I did more research. It does indeed support foveated rendering. Developers do need to implement this for their game, but it supports it.

discussed here: https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU?t=1074

"For foveated rendering, [the developers] have that option, but it's not compulsory"

[jasonjmcghee]

Yes - thank you, fixed

[baq]

I lowkey hope it's good enough for coding. Really wanted to try out the xreal glasses, but multiple people said they aren't crisp enough for text.

[nickstinemates]

I can't wait until the tech reaches this stage. Infinite desktop space, surrounded by text and terminals. It will be so hard to unplug.

[bitwize]

EMACS. EMACS EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK.

[nulld3v]

There are already headsets with decent text fidelity, but IMO the problem is now on the host side. I tried to get an XR desktop env running (Stardust https://stardustxr.org/) on Linux but ran into graphical issues. The Windows ecosystem is much better though.

[philote]

I use Xreal Air Pros for gaming and sometimes working if I'm mobile. Resolution isn't great, but I find them better than looking at a small-ish laptop screen or the Steam Deck screen. You can definitely read text on them, but maybe not small text. It also helps to have prescription inserts.

And now I'm curious if the Steam Frame allows inserts or fits well with glasses on.

[cultofmetatron]

resolution is in the 2000x2000 range so don't count on it.

[jasonjmcghee]

2160 per eye- so a bit more than that in width… I’m thinking if you do 2x pixel density it could look pretty clean. But that’s not a whole lot of real estate… that being said, i remember when 1280x1024 was incredible and that’s the same ballpark as what you’d get.

[u8080]

This is not directly comparable with display resolution since actually you are looking for PPI per degree of vision to judge on clarity.

[yencabulator]

That's 2160 pixels over ~110 degrees field of view. How many degrees of your view does your monitor cover? The density comes out very different.

[nialv7]

> So Steam + Proton works on aarch64?

CodeWeavers just announced[0] CrossOver on ARM a couple of days ago, so yes.

[0]: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2025/11/6/twist-ou...

[sho_hn]

Mainly check out the Valve-sponsored FEX project.

[delusional]

I'm more confused that it's running SteamOS which is supposedly Arch based, but arch doesn't officially support ARM. You have to use the ArchLinuxARM distro for that, which is less maintained. They got to be doing something off label for that.

[0x457]

> arch doesn't officially support ARM

Doesn't really mean much to Valve as SteamOS vendor:

- linux kernel supports aarch64 just fine

- user space supports aarach64 just as fine

- Valve provides runtime for games (be it via proton or native linux), so providing aarch64 builds is up to them anyway

The main point of ArchLinuxARM is providing compatible binaries, which isn't something hard to do in-house.

[uncletaco]

Even if they are, Valve has a long track record of contributing back to open source projects.

[0x1ch]

Proton was a community led effort years back. The guy who started that is now an employee at Valve (IIRC) working on Proton, but also getting paid :)

[whatevaa]

Arch doesn't support ARM at all. Arm is somebody else hobby project.

[gavinsyancey]

Arch has been working with Valve on various build system improvements for some time [0], which as I understand it are targeted at making it more feasible for them to eventually support more architectures [1]. This doesn't release for several months; I wonder if there'll be an official Arch Linux ARM by then?

[0]: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696041

[tiberious726]

You mean valve's?

[wafflemaker]

isn't Steam Deck arm based?

[delusional]

No. It's an AMD x64 CPU married to an onboard GPU.

[milutinovici]

No, it's AMD based

[jadbox]

When's the preorders happening?

[ljm]

It also looks like they've launched a new version of the Steam Controller.

[sylens]

I think this is a form of an announcement but without many details. I'm curious to see how well it works