Helping Valve to power up Steam devices • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#41

Post by jorvi » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

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.

[0]https://github.com/firelzrd/bore-scheduler

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#42

Post by TingPing » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

righthand wrote: post #40

TingPing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#43

Post by rpmisms » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

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.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#44

Post by righthand » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

TingPing wrote: post #42

righthand wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#45

Post by uejfiweun » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

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.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#46

Post by colechristensen » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

wronglebowski wrote: post #6

fidotron wrote: post #2

> 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.

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.

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.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#47

Post by Zambyte » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #15

huseyinkeles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#48

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

ozarkerD wrote: post #33

charcircuit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#49

Post by sbarre » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

rpmisms wrote: post #43

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.

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...

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#50

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #47

charcircuit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open source work.

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.

[deleted]