Steam on Chromebook is entering beta testing with ChromeOS 108
Recently Google and Valve announced that they have started beta testing of the implementation of the game delivery service Steam for the Chrome OS platform. Bringing the ability to use Steam and its gaming apps is available for Acer, ASUS, HP, Framework, IdeaPad, and Lenovo Chromebooks with at least an Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 CPU and 8GB of RAM (i5/ Ryzen 5 and 16 GB of RAM recommended).
Compared to previously offered alpha versions, the beta version triples the number of supported Chromebooks and that above all it simplifies the interface, improves performance and improves game compatibility (added 50 new games to the list of tested games).
It is mentioned that launching supplied games for both Linux and Windows is supported. When choosing a game, it first tries to launch the Linux build of the game, but if there is no Linux version, you can also install the Windows version, which will run using the Proton layer based on Wine, DXVK, and vkd3d .
The games run in a separate virtual machine with a Linux environment, whose implementation is based on the subsystem CrosVM used by the KVM hypervisor.
The Steam on Chromebook project is all about bringing the best and most innovative games to Chromebook users with the performance they need to shine. That means everything from adding support for major graphics libraries like DirectX 12 and Vulkan 1.3 to improving the way shaders are stored and persisted.
One of the broader performance improvements relates to high resolution displays, which previously suffered a significant performance hit even when the game itself was running at a much lower resolution. We've improved our scaling system so you can now play many more games on QHD and UHD screens and see the performance benefits of lowering your game resolution on all screens.
Inside the base virtual machine, separate containers with programs (used by LXC) are launched, which can be installed as normal applications for Chrome OS.
Installed Linux applications they run similarly to Android apps on Chrome OS, displaying icons in the app drawer. For running graphical applications, CrosVM provides built-in support for Wayland clients (virtio-wayland) with the Sommelier composite server running on the main host side.
In addition, it is also important to mention that both Wayland-based applications and normal X programs (the XWayland layer is used) are supported.
For the part of the changes made in the beta version, the following stand out:
- Added support for AMD Ryzen 5000 C and 12 Gen Intel Gen Core CPUs, lowered minimum requirements for Intel Core i3 and AMD Ryzen 3 CPUs.
- Added game specific optimizations and tweaks.
- Reduced disk space consumption when changing the shader cache format.
- Provided shader cache persistence between sessions.
- Added initial support for DirectX 12.
- Added support for Vulkan 1.3.
- Reduced CPU usage in games that use the DirectX and Vulkan graphics APIs.
- Redesigned storage management to house games downloaded from Steam.
- Previously, space was allocated based on the size of the installation files and did not take into account content that could be downloaded directly from the game. Additional space can now be allocated dynamically.
- Optimized scaling and rendering operations using the GPU. Improved output scaling performance for very high resolution displays (QHD and UHD).
- Improved switching to full screen mode.
- Improved keyboard handling.
- Improved window management.
- Added low battery notification, even in full screen games.
- A new installer has been proposed.
- Improved performance when using OpenGL and Vulkan.
Finally for those interested in being able to test the beta version of Steam, you should know that it is already offered in test builds of Chrome OS 108.0.5359.24 (can be enabled via chrome://flags#enable-borealis).
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.