In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa’s open-source “Turnip” Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.
Linux consulting firm Igalia who has long seen funded work from Valve wrote a blog post today to outline their recent efforts given last week’s Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller announcement. Igalia highlighted the work they have been doing for the Steam Frame around FEX for x86/x86_64 emulation on ARM for the Qualcomm Snapdragon powered VR device. Plus the work done to Turnip for serving as the Vulkan driver on the Steam Frame
Interesting, I thought Vulcan was deprecated for ROCM
It would’ve been an instant buy if it had nice color passthrough and oled
i built a new desktop AND preordered a bigscreen beyond 2e this year. i’ve never been so simultaneously excited and upset lmao
ive always wanted to try VR games but the ps5 vr headset was too locked down to the ps5. Never even wanted the oculus cause of meta’s bullshit. Will definitely be getting this.
100% instant buy, as long as it’s under a certain price point. Even if it isn’t… I’ve been holding off on VR for so long, this is gonna be the thing that does it.
VR is an awesome experience if you’re into it. When I first tried out my Vive it was mind blowing. Truly something that you can’t really get any other way. I’m absolutely getting a Frame on release
I’ve never tried it but I can see myself being happy with it if beat saber another other games like pistol whip end up being something I use it often for. And I also want to try Half Life Alyx.
Honestly, I was blown away by beat saber. I almost bought a meta quest, but I hated the required Facebook integration. I won’t do it. This will be a million times better
Might get one later 2026 but the Steam Machine will be on release day
For me, it was the biggest announcement from that and probably the reason i might invest in the Steam Frame.
That way I support Valve (or more like “i agree with that so here is my money) going the way of ARM support for Linux, the same way I bought the Steam Deck to “support” Proton translation layers.
I’m really excited with all this ARM compatibility stuff. Hopefully we will be able to install steam OS on Android devices at some point.
Is this how we get Linux phones?
No the drivers arnt available, fuck Qualcomm and ARM.
Maybe RISC in time?
I think Qualcomm drivers are the least of our problems. Getting all the other drivers for 5G, GPS, gyro, accelerometer, compass, WiFi etc is going to be an issue since they’re all vendor loaded blobs now.
Actually, often the are available, but of such low code quality and depending on various out of tree changes in the Linux kernel that it is easier to rewrite them if you want to get them into mainline Linux.
And RISC-V has more or less the same problem.
That would be such a turn of events!
Android is already a Linux-based OS.
