Developer Loads Steam On a $100 ARM Single Board Computer (interfacinglinux.com)
(Sunday March 23, 2025 @06:34PM (EditorDavid)
from the ready-player-two dept.)
- Reference: 0176798719
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/03/23/1922228/developer-loads-steam-on-a-100-arm-single-board-computer
- Source link: https://interfacinglinux.com/2025/03/15/steam-on-armbian-rockchip-3588/
"There's no shortage of videos showing Steam running on expensive ARM single-board computers with discrete GPUs," writes Slashdot reader [1]VennStone . "So I thought it would be worthwhile to make a guide for doing it on (relatively) inexpensive RK3588-powered single-board computers, using Box86/64 and [2]Armbian ."
> The guides I came across were out of date, had a bunch of extra steps thrown in, or were outright incorrect... Up first, we need to add the [3]Box86 and [4]Box64 ARM repositories [along with dependencies, ARMHF architecture, and the Mesa graphics driver]...
The guide closes with a multi-line script and advice to "Just close your eyes and run this. It's not pretty, but it will download the Steam Debian package, extract the needed bits, and set up a launch script." (And then the final step is sudo reboot now .)
"At this point, all you have to do is open a terminal, type 'steam', and tap Enter. You'll have about five minutes to wait... [5]Check out the video to see how some of the tested games perform."
> At 720p, performance is all over the place, but the games I tested typically managed to stay above 30 FPS. This is better than I was expecting from a four-year-old SOC emulating x86 titles under ARM.
>
> Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness. Things might get a wee bit better, considering [6]Collabora is working on upstream support for RK3588 and Valve is up to something ARM-related, but ya know, "Valve Time"...
"You might be tempted to enable Steam Play for your Windows games, but don't waste your time. I mean, you can try, but it ain't gonna work."
[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~VennStone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armbian
[3] https://github.com/ryanfortner/box86-debs
[4] https://github.com/ryanfortner/box64-debs
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-n-6FviZDk
[6] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/rockchip-rk3588-upstream-support-progress-future-plans.html
> The guides I came across were out of date, had a bunch of extra steps thrown in, or were outright incorrect... Up first, we need to add the [3]Box86 and [4]Box64 ARM repositories [along with dependencies, ARMHF architecture, and the Mesa graphics driver]...
The guide closes with a multi-line script and advice to "Just close your eyes and run this. It's not pretty, but it will download the Steam Debian package, extract the needed bits, and set up a launch script." (And then the final step is sudo reboot now .)
"At this point, all you have to do is open a terminal, type 'steam', and tap Enter. You'll have about five minutes to wait... [5]Check out the video to see how some of the tested games perform."
> At 720p, performance is all over the place, but the games I tested typically managed to stay above 30 FPS. This is better than I was expecting from a four-year-old SOC emulating x86 titles under ARM.
>
> Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness. Things might get a wee bit better, considering [6]Collabora is working on upstream support for RK3588 and Valve is up to something ARM-related, but ya know, "Valve Time"...
"You might be tempted to enable Steam Play for your Windows games, but don't waste your time. I mean, you can try, but it ain't gonna work."
[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~VennStone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armbian
[3] https://github.com/ryanfortner/box86-debs
[4] https://github.com/ryanfortner/box64-debs
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-n-6FviZDk
[6] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/rockchip-rk3588-upstream-support-progress-future-plans.html
But can it run Crysis? (Score:1)
by SgtKellogg ( 1306665 )
Jokes aside this is pretty cool, there are tons of ARM based handhelds on the market that this would be a huge boon for
Re: (Score:2)
by DamnOregonian ( 963763 )
This is something you've always been able to do arm SBCs that ran linux... It's always been terrible... still is.
He came across guides that were out of date, which wouldn't surprise me- the following trying to maintain the functionality of full virtualization on an arm SBC is microscopic due to how bad it is.
inexpensive (Score:2)
If $100 is inexpensive, which ones are the expensive ARM SBCs?
Re: (Score:2)
NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano is $250, so $100 isn't really near the top of the market.
And some people have been messing with plugging discrete graphics cards into PCIe slots on ARM systems, and that gets expensive fast.
Re: (Score:3)
I have $1000 SBCs.
$100 is pretty cheap.
It's an Orange Pi 5 Plus. This isn't a raspberry Pi. It's got 2 2.5Gbit ethernet ports and 3 HDMI ports, m.2, and eMMC.