In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa's open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.

Linux consulting firm Igalia who has long seen funded work from Valve wrote a blog post today to outline their recent efforts given last week's [1]Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller announcement . Igalia highlighted the work they have been doing for the Steam Frame around FEX for x86/x86_64 emulation on ARM for the Qualcomm Snapdragon powered VR device. Plus the work done to Turnip for serving as the Vulkan driver on the Steam Frame.

Igalia's blog post today formally confirms that the Mesa [2]Turnip Vulkan driver is being used by the Steam Frame as opposed to any other Qualcomm Vulkan vendor driver. Turnip originally started as a reverse-engineered, open-source driver solution from the Freedreno developers working on the free software Qualcomm Adreno Linux driver stack.

Igalia engineers have been doing a lot of work for ensuring that Turnip will be able to handle all the rendering work and graphics performance well.

Those wishing to learn more can do so via the Igalia blog post " [3]Helping Valve to Power Up Steam Devices ."



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Turnip

[3] https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html