We have been building an arm64 version of the Steam snap and gaming-graphics for the past few months, and they’re now ready for broader testing!
Since the Steam client for Linux is currently only available for x86, we’ve bundled that version of Steam along with FEX in our arm64 snap, which is used to emulate amd64 and i386 for Steam.
This should be treated like a beta test, so you may encounter unexpected behavior or bugs.
If you have an arm64 device and would like to try it out, simply run sudo snap install --candidate steam
and then launch Steam normally via the app launcher!
Please let us know how it performs on your devices!
Important notes
This snap is not officially supported by Valve, so If you encounter any issues, please open an issue in our bug tracker.
(However, we are extremely grateful for Valve’s extensive work on FEX and Proton, without which none of this would have been possible).
If you previously installed Steam on your arm64 device using fex_autoinstall (either my or NVIDIA’s version), I recommend uninstalling that version first via sudo apt remove steam-launcher before installing the snap.
Platform testing and compatibility
Our primary focus so far has been developing and testing this on the NVIDIA DGX Spark with the 580.95.05 NVIDIA driver series.
Early performance testing on DGX Spark is promising in several games in our libraries (both native, and via Proton). (Details below)
We are currently investigating a known issue preventing proper client functionality on Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops
Edit 1/13/26: We are also now aware of an issue launching the client on Raspberry Pi devices due to missing v3d drivers, and are investigating this as well. (Thanks for the reports!)
This snap will not currently run on Apple Silicon Macs running Asahi Linux due to their 16k page size requirement
Edit 1/20/26: We have identified an issue where some resource-intensive games have audio choppiness. If your game encounters this issue, we recommend setting the following custom launch option for that game (by right-clicking on the game in Steam, selecting ‘properties’, and then adding this to your “launch options” box):
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=50
We have opted not to set this as a global default since it might be undesirable for some competitive games which currently don’t experience this issue.
Game Performance
My team and I have tested the following games on our DGX Sparks. (Note that this is not intended to be comprehensive; rather, it is just a quick a look into the types of games we’ve had success with so far)
smooth, no notable performance issues. (2+ hour session)
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
DOTA 2
Linux x86
smooth, no notable performance issues
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
Outer Wilds
Windows x86 (via ProtonGE-10-17)
smooth, no notable performance issues (~20 minute test)
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
Half-Life 2
Linux x86
smooth, no notable performance issues
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
Portal 2
Linux x86
smooth, no notable performance issues
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
Garry’s Mod
Linux x86
smooth, no notable performance issues
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
Hollow Knight Silksong
Windows x86 (via Proton)
Very smooth (~10 minute test)
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ Ubuntu Questing
Clair Obscur Expedition 33
Windows x86 (via Proton)
Playable (~10 minute test)
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ Ubuntu Questing
Golf with your Friends
Linux x86
100+ FPS, smooth, no notable performance issues
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
PEAK
Windows x86 (via ProtonGE-10-17)
Was previously unstable, but is now stable across 3x ~10 minute tests after a recent game update when testing on 1/7/26. (but have not yet tested with multiple players).
NVIDIA DGX Spark w/ DGX OS (Ubuntu Noble)
Disclaimer: This snap is experimental, comes without warranty or official support, and is provided on a best-effort basis
Is this running Vulkan and OpenGL on the ARM side?
At the moment, it is all being emulated. There are some additional changes we still need to make to our snap layout (in addition to the standard FEX config change you mention) to enable thunking in the snap, which is what I’m actively working on… so stay tuned!
Bit of an edge case here, but i get a “fex_launcher.sh: line 116: 5360 Illegal instruction” error when trying to run it. cpuinfo shows my processor as an ARM cortex A57. To be slightly more specific, the CPU is a Tegra X1, housed in a small handheld gaming device made by certain Japanese company whose name starts with “N”. Running 24.04.3 LTS currently.
EDIT: The number before “illegal instruction” keeps going up if i re-run the command
EDIT2: Looks like the kernel is 4.9.140-l4t (a customized one for tegra) and it isn’t compatible with FEX (looks like it needs 5.15)
We’ve internally identified a couple areas where we expect to be able to gain performance improvements, which we’re currently investigating.
Regarding some of the games that are not launching - I would recommend taking a look at the protondb.com pages for those games to see if there are any quick fixes, if you have not already. I have found that even on some of my amd64 systems, I sometimes need to try out a few different suggestions there to get things working.
For fun, I tried running it on a Raspberry Pi 5 running 24.04 and 25.10 to see if it would do anything at all. (Yeah, I know the performance would be…lacking.) Steam installs just fine, as far as I can tell. But it hangs when you try to run it saying it can’t find v3d drivers. It looks like there are v3d drivers…but I don’t know if the hardware/software meets the requirements to run. If anyone has a fix for this, I am interested.
Once thunking can be activated (running OpenGL and Vulkan on the ARM side), I think we will be able to run it on a Pi 5. With a manual install of Fex and Steam on a Radxa Dragon Q6A Snapdragon SBC, I need more than 8GB memory to run a game. So I need swap memory on top of 8GB RAM.
Performance will be lacking, but it should be possible to run some simple games.
I’m also using a DGX Spark.
I tried Satisfactory, which ran very smooth even on my larger denser factories, but I don’t think its rendering quite right, I remember it looking better than this at ultra graphics.
Brotato and Factorio appear to run perfectly with no issues.
EDIT
Returnal - the opening logo videos went slo mo, but after that the game ran smooth.
I just provided video with few games tested on my MinisForum MS-R1 Workstation with China CixinP1 12 core ARM and dGPU ( minipc have PCIE slot ) Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti.
Steam uses the gpu-2404 content interface, provided by the mesa-2404 snap, we’d need a mesa snap that carries these drivers (most likely in a specific channel, like we do have the kisak/stable or asahi/stable channels for it already) so you can simply swap out the standard mesa provided to steam by one that has msm, panforst and whatnot on board …
Not sure why I can’t edit my post anymore.
Realized my resolution was off as a result of fixing a problem i initially had setting up my spark. Back to 4k now, satisfactory looks fine, I was running it at a lower resolution.
Tested Returnal again. still runs great.
HunterXHunter Nen Impact runs great
Soul Calibur VI runs great
Vampire Survivors runs great
Dunecrawl runs great
