Valve confirms it’s working with Intel and Nvidia on SteamOS for more GPUs

Jay Peters

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

MSI’s Intel-powered Claw gaming handhelds have so far mostly been Windows machines, meaning that anyone who picks one up has to deal with the crusty experience that is Windows on a handheld gaming PC. But now, both Valve and Intel tell The Verge that they’re working with each other, and people like YouTuber ETA Prime are already having good experiences with SteamOS on Intel.

Valve’s recently launched SteamOS 3.8 update spells out that Valve has added “initial firmware for upcoming Intel handhelds” and controller support for some MSI Claw devices, including last year’s well-received 8 AI Plus. ETA Prime actually got a beta of SteamOS 3.8 running on that machine, and while he said it’s “not perfect,” it appears that everything works pretty well, for the most part. A user on Reddit was also able to get SteamOS booted up on an Intel Arc B580 desktop GPU.

Alongside the just-announced launch of the Steam Machine, Valve said that it will let people build their own Steam Machine-like SteamOS-powered desktops starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release. Valve is also “working closely” with Intel, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge, saying that Intel has “been doing a lot of hard work on getting the graphics stack up and running there and making sure everything’s optimized.”

Intel has been a bit cagier. In a press briefing for the MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus — which I just published a hands-on for — Intel’s Nick Mijuskovic said the company didn’t have “anything to share timeline-wise on SteamOS support” for Intel’s Panther Lake architecture, which includes the handheld-specific G3 Extreme chip that powers the Claw 8 EX AI Plus. “We’re very aware of the demand on the Linux side,” Mijuskovic says. “Some of us are gaming on Linux ourselves. We are working on the Mesa driver, we are working with Valve, and that’s kind of all we can say for now. But it’s something that we’re working on.”

Valve is also aware of the desire for SteamOS support on Nvidia hardware, but we might be waiting a while for that to actually roll out. Griffais confirms that Valve is collaborating with Nvidia “very closely” and that Valve has “a growing team” of people just working on Nvidia drivers, but he doesn’t expect support will be available this year.

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Jay Peters