Valve has long been preparing its software stack for the arrival of both the Steam Machine and the upcoming Steam Frame, and the latest update sees the gaming giant add a long list of fixes, QoL improvements, and features to SteamVR as well as changes to the developer back-end in order to prepare fo...
Its also so that some games and/or parts of games can just run entirely on the Steam Frame Headset.
Basically, ARM (mobile) physical hardware is more compact, less energy intensive, and heat causing, than traditional x86-64.
So, they built the hardware of the headset, the Steam Frame, as… essentially, an extremely overbuilt smartphone, because they wanted you to be able to go cordless, un tethered, with decent battery life, as compared to their last headset, the Index, which has to be corded in to both data and power at all times.
So, there are various rendering and other game processes that just run locally on the Steam Frame, via ARM hardware, where for a chonkier game, the core game processes are running on the Steam Machine, and the two share a highspeed, local, wireless datalink.
To get all that to work, well, linux x86-64 instructions need to be interpretable on ARM, thus, make a new translation layer, FEX.
That this means some APKs in their entirety should now just generally be able to run on a Steam Frame, solo… is essentially a side effect.
Not trying to ‘correct’ you, just trying to add more context.
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Its also so that some games and/or parts of games can just run entirely on the Steam Frame Headset.
Basically, ARM (mobile) physical hardware is more compact, less energy intensive, and heat causing, than traditional x86-64.
So, they built the hardware of the headset, the Steam Frame, as… essentially, an extremely overbuilt smartphone, because they wanted you to be able to go cordless, un tethered, with decent battery life, as compared to their last headset, the Index, which has to be corded in to both data and power at all times.
So, there are various rendering and other game processes that just run locally on the Steam Frame, via ARM hardware, where for a chonkier game, the core game processes are running on the Steam Machine, and the two share a highspeed, local, wireless datalink.
To get all that to work, well, linux x86-64 instructions need to be interpretable on ARM, thus, make a new translation layer, FEX.
That this means some APKs in their entirety should now just generally be able to run on a Steam Frame, solo… is essentially a side effect.
Not trying to ‘correct’ you, just trying to add more context.
Thanks, you typed more than I was going to :)
Only note is FEX and the Android compatibility layer were two separate goals Valve put a lot of work into, so I wouldn’t classify it as a side-effect.
One is to allow Windows games to work on the Frame, the other is to allow Android games to work on the Frame