With the current rise of PC ARM processor (Apple silicone, Snapdragon X), anyone feel like Steam missed the opportunity when developing Deck with x86 and now they have to stick with it?
I tried Apple MacBook Air M2 with a bunch of games and emulators and it runs amazing while being extremely efficient.
I can run Switch emulator Ryujinx with Mario Kart Deluxe 8 at 60FPS and it only need 12Wh, compared to my PC (i5, 1070) need ~150Wh to do the same thing.
I do think that the future of handheld devices is ARM or RISC-V, but the software support isn’t there yet and would severely limit what could be played.
The fact that almost no PC games support ARM is stopping them. When lots game developers start releasing ARM or RISC-V versions, then Valve may consider an ARM or RISC-V Steam Deck. They will still have to have an emulator to run the older x86 games though.
This is where I’m confused. Games for Mac seem to run fine on both Intel Mac and Apple silicone Mac, and run even better on the later.
The only downside is Apple has dropped support for 32bit so it broke a lot of old games.
If Valve can make Proton to bridge the gap between Windows and Linux, I’m sure they can do something to make x86 games run on ARM (just like Apple did and they’re not even focused on gaming, Apple hates gamers)
Someone on Lemmy said that would require Valve to completely rewrite the Proton layer (which they’ve invested tons of time and money in) and probably the SteamOS would require significant overhaul too. And all the backwards compatibility would be thrown out the window.
Or in other words, that would require Valve to completely redesign the Deck from scratch.
Considering the trend seems to be a move towards ARM (see Mac M1, Windows on ARM + Window’s ARM translation layer) - I wouldnt be surprised if they do exactly that, eventually.
There’s already some work that might lead to it. As ARM gains prevalence, I think it’ll happen sooner rather than later - once all of those dependencies do all the hard work. The efficiency of ARM for mobile devices like the Steam Deck really just scream for it
