ARM CPU Support

[Zedman Moaz]

MacOS has switched to ARM and Microsoft has released Windows on ARM. Performance wise the first gen ARM chip from Apple is on par with near top of the line intel and nVidia laptop chipsets, it is reasonable to assume the 2nd or 3rd generations will significantly surpass those. ARM CPUs are significantly cheaper, especially considering the added expense of a GPU.
Before the 240hz 8k fanboys start getting their shorts in a bunch let me just say I’m talking about the 95% of gamers who just want to play games and are perfectly happy with 90hz 1080p gaming and don’t intend on spending $3000 on a gaming rig with a 32-core Threadripper and nVidia 3080 as I have done myself. For 95% of gamers the Apple’s first gen M1 chip which is available in a $999 MacBook laptop is more than capable. Qualcomm and other ARM SoC vendors are investing a lot to catch up to Apple to provide SoC for Windows laptops that last 20 hours on a charge instead of 2, don’t have cooling fans, and cost considerably less than comparable intel or AMD offerings. Needless to say, a handheld device based on ARM would be a lot cheaper than Steam’s upcoming AMD based handheld and instead of a 2 hours battery life it would likely last 10-20 hours.

Given all of the above, it would be prudent for Steam to consider a future path to supporting ARM architecture, such as releasing SteamOS for ARM and asking developers to recompile their SteamOS games to offer “Universal” binaries that run on either x86 or ARM, and offering a translator as Apple and Microsoft have done to allow for older games that are x86 only to run on ARM CPUs (SteamOS does already support a Windows emulator for running Windows x86 games)

[aiusepsi]

You're probably going to get a bunch of trolls saying that it's outrageously difficult to recompile software for ARM, so Valve will never do anything like this. To these people I say: Valve's own Source 2 engine and the majority of the Steam client's code have demonstrably already been ported to ARM, because they're used in the iOS and Android versions of Dota Underlords. Ports to ARM are really not that hard.

Originally posted by Zedman Moaz:

asking developers to recompile their SteamOS games to offer “Universal” binaries that run on either x86 or ARM

Unfortunately, the ELF executable file format used for Linux executables doesn't support Universal binaries. Neither does Windows's PE format. Steam would have to support ARM on these platforms a similar way to what it does with supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 executables on Windows/Linux today, which is to allow developers to tag a content depot for their game as only being for machines with a particular architecture, so it only downloads the right executables for the machine you're on.

[Brian9824]

Steam doesn't ask developers to do anything regarding THEIR games. Just like best buy, amazon, walmart, etc don't ask them. So you'd have better luck posting on the forums for the games itself.

[Crazy Tiger]

Valve only can provide tools, it's up to game developers/publishers to decide what they want to do with their games and what they consider worth their time and money.

[nullable]

At some point there will be ARM support for games. It's just the demographic is small enough and the machines running ARM aren't gaming machines and there's not a huge benefit to being first to a market that doesn't really exist yet.

Once there's real money on the table ARM compatible games will be there.