One of the biggest goal’s of Valve’s latest wave of hardware wasn’t necessarily to move as many units as possible, but to expand the reach of SteamOS, and it does seem like it’s succeeded. There are now two things that are really standing in Valve’s way in its quest to dethrone Windows 11 as the de facto gaming OS: anti-cheat and Nvidia graphics drivers. And it looks like the latter is going to be solved soon.
Ahead of Steam Frame’s launch, I got a chance to sit down with Valve software developers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Jeff Leinbaugh, and I asked how Nvidia support was coming along.
“Yeah, we’re working on it hard,” Griffais told me. “It’s definitely at the top of our list. It’s one of those things just like FEX and working on the Qualcomm driver, it just takes years.” That doesn’t sound like the driver support is right around the corner, but it does seem like the team has at least got Nvidia GPUs working on the Linux OS, albeit with limited performance.
“We’ve done a few things like we’ve enabled the driver now in the main tree of SteamOS,” Griffais told me, “so you can get things to light up on certain generations, but in terms of the performance difference between that driver and where the state of the art is, there’s definitely still a little bit of a rift that we’re trying to work on, but it’s getting better day-to-day.”
There are certainly versions of Linux that already work with Nvidia drivers, but Team Green’s GPUs are always a bit of a hassle on the open-source operating system. Instead, for most people, gaming on Linux works best with AMD graphics cards, as that company has supported drivers on the operating system for years.
But for Valve’s goal of getting as many people on SteamOS as possible, getting Nvidia’s cards working at full performance is incredibly important. According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, Nvidia GPUs still make up for 72.88% of Steam’s player base. Getting Nvidia graphics cards up and running reliably on SteamOS would be a huge win for Valve.
Hopefully Valve is able to get these graphics cards working as intended on SteamOS soon, and then, maybe, we can finally get anti-cheat support on the operating system. Because, after all, unlocking the operating system for another 72% of the playerbase could cause a huge spike in players migrating from Windows, and that’d be hard to ignore for the Call of Dutys of the world.
