Since I posted this in another thread, I might as well post it here too
Running “Portal 2” on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptop - Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.
Runs better than on a Asahi M.2 16Gb with Fedora remix.
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It works ! When updating I choose to overwrite the config.json with the one from the snap edge package.
Half life 2 launches. I got issue with HL2 and fractional scaling and mouse cursor position but might be related to other issue.
I tested also the outer worlds, it takes time to load but it works well except from some sound synchronization issues during cinematics.
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Awesome, glad to hear it’s working now!
We found that adding PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=50 as a per-game launch option (within the Steam properties page for the impacted game) improved some sound issues with a few games, specifically if you’re hearing the sound cut out intermittently. Might be worth a shot if that sounds similar to what you’re hearing in The Outer Worlds.
I can confirm it also works with older Snapdragon chips. I tested it on a Radxa Dragon Q6A with Snapdragon QCS6490, Armbian based on Ubuntu Noble, kernel 6.18.8.
I didn’t see a difference in performance without thunking, compared to a manual installation of Fex with thunking. I have the suspicion that Fex doesn’t have the GPU drivers in the RootFS, and just uses llvmpipe. And that was why I was looking for thunking, as it makes a big difference with a manual installation of Fex. It might still make sense to use thunking, as I do have the impression that it lowers the memory footprint.
Enabling thunking for OpenGL breaks things. I can enable drm and Vulkan.
With thunking for OpenGL I see this error:
Adding process 3893 for gameID 220
Opening host-side X11 display: 0xaabfdfa0 → 0xffdc9000
SDL video target is ‘x11’
SDL video target is ‘x11’
Failed to create SDL window: Couldn’t find matching GLX visualGame Recording - game stopped [gameid=220]
I also tested it on the Radxa Rock 5B Rockchip RK3588 SBC. I was able to start a game, but performance was horrible. I guess it really needs the panthor driver in the snap package.
How often should we expect updates to the included mesa build in the RootFS?
Installation failed on Raspberry Pi 5 with
Copying default FEX config to /home/pi/snap/steam/common/fex_config/
<jemalloc>: Unsupported system page size
<jemalloc>: Unsupported system page size
<jemalloc>: Unsupported system page size
due to 16k page size. Opening steam kept failing after switching to 4k pages. Steam needed to be removed and re-installed.
I think it would greatly improve UX if the setup checks for 4k pages, fails with a clear error message and allows the setup to be re-started/continued without re-install.
I’m trying not to lag too far behind kisak-mesa fresh, but since this is best-effort, we might not always update ours immediately when that PPA gets an update. It’ll really depend on whether we observe any issues on any of the devices that are currently known to work with this snap, since we want to avoid regressing those.
So, I’d say every couple months is a reasonable guess (but may vary depending on the nature of each update in kisak-mesa fresh).
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I think it would greatly improve UX if the setup checks for 4k pages, fails with a clear error message and allows the setup to be re-started/continued without re-install.
Thanks for the suggestion - added to my todo list 
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Any chance you can integrate muvm to enable support for Asahi?
While it would be ideal if we could enable this on 16k page size platforms, implementing the microVM within snap confinement would be a very substantial task (which we are not entirely sure would even be feasible with strict confinement in the end) - so unfortunately, 16k page size enablement is not in our scope.
is there a word on RPI fix?
No ETA on RPi at the moment. I had to prioritize some other work items this week, but that is still on my radar.
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Hello, this is my first post on here, thank you so much for the work you’re putting in this, I can confirm the Snap (Edge version) currently does work on the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB (4k pagesize), I’ve been able to get Half-Life Opposing Force to work between 15 up to 33 FPS, only the night vision drops performance massively when enabled, before this the Pi-Apps version of Steam could not run the game at all (constant flashing and single digit FPS) and the client itself was unstable (now also fixed thanks to the native one). Even Proton Experimental is working for some older games and many 2D Unity games that have a native Linux build run flawlessly already.
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So, I got it to work! At this point, all you have to do is install it is run the command “sudo snap install --edge” . It seems that that there is an issue with Steam accessing the v3d drivers if you run it any other way. I was able to install and run Half Life 2 afterwards without even a hiccup!
That being said, the performance is so poor that I can’t recommend this to anyone at this time. I had to turn all of the settings all the way down on Half Life 2 to get a frame rate that was even arguably playable. I had a better frame rate on release day, over 20 years ago. Looking at the stats, the Pi’s tiny little integrated GPU was the bottleneck, not the ARM processor.
Anyway, I did this more to see if it would work than to have some kind of a gaming box. I am quite aware that this is a Raspberry Pi. And I only see this project improving in the future.
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Probably the bottleneck is access to the iGPU. Have you tried enabling thunking for OpenGL and Vulkan in the config file?
As a comparison, you can try it with a manual installation of Fex and Steam.
I haven’t tested it, but you can find some instructions here: Tutorial: Running Steam games on arm64 with FEX
Hardware tested
Most of these tests I ran on an 8GB Pi 5, and mostly things ran fine but about half way through the tests I switched to a 16GB model so I could run a web browser at the same time. I used a 1080p monitor rather than 4K to give things a better chance of running smoothly (if they ran at all). Summarizing:
- Raspberry Pi 5 8GB
- Raspberry Pi 5 16GB
- OS: Ubuntu 25.10 (questing)
- Storage: 500GB Samsung 980 NVMe SSD
- Display: 1080p monitor (but sometimes running lower, e.g. 720p)
- Input: keyboard, mouse, and PS3 controllers (over USB) attempted
I mostly stuck with testing things in my Steam library that I figured are “lightweight” or “low end” in the hopes of finding more things that work (note: not necessarily “old”, though in a lot of cases they are).
The Bad
This is all the stuff I tried that simply didn’t run. In most cases the console output indicated some graphics driver issue but I’m not entirely sure that’s relevant (I saw the same error in at least two games that did run successfully, and there’s a lot of error spam generally in the console, so I’m not going to speculate on causes below):
- Clustertruck
- Darwinia
- Dear Esther (original)
- Evil Genius
- Gorogoa
- Grand Theft Auto
- Hohokum
- Lego Batman
- Lost at Sea
- Monument Valley
- NaissanceE
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Sayonara Wild Hearts
- Thank Goodness You’re Here
- The Baconing
- The Path
- The Swapper
- Townscaper
The Ugly
This is stuff that started, but had some issue that made it unplayable:
- Cogs: starts with audio but no video
- Braid: started, but even down at 720p this was too slow to be playable
- Half Life: amazingly this works and mostly works well (smooth gameplay at 720p at least), however anything involving dynamic lighting (sparks, explosions, etc.) causes a long delay of a second or two
- The Longest Journey: starts and is almost playable but some interactions are slow enough to be annoying to accurately click on
- Oxenfree: starts but too slow to be playable
- Penumbra Black Plague: starts and tutorial appears mostly smooth, but the graphics are weirdly broken to the point of being horribly distracting. I should retry this and fiddle with the settings…
- Quake: default and original – original started with audio but no video
- Worms: starts but way too slow to be playable
The Good
All the stuff below is “playable”. By this, I don’t mean it works as well (or as smoothly) as it does on a PC, or is entirely issue-free, but simply “did I enjoy playing it?”. If so, it’s in this list:
- The Bridge
- Broken Age
- Day of the Tentacle (remastered): playable, but some annoying audio stuttering in some
scenes - DefCon
- Eufloria
- Freeways
- Frozen Synapse: playable, but no sound?
- Limbo
- Myst (masterpiece edition): takes ages to start, but then works fine!
- OddWorld Abe’s Exodus
- Orwell
- Rimworld: first launch got stuck at “Loading Defs…” but restarted and it’s fine!
- Rush: needs lower quality settings but is playable
- Super Meat Boy: runs but couldn’t get my PS3 controllers working with it so it’s keyboard only (so it’s “playable” …)
- The Tiny Bang Story: long pauses on scene changes, but otherwise fine
- Toki Tori
- World of Goo
The PS3 controllers (connected by USB) were recognized by Steam, and the Steam Input layer appeared happy within Steam itself. I could open the controller settings menu and see the representation of the controller responding to most inputs reasonably smoothly, but it was notable the left analog stick had no horizontal motion (I tried on two controllers, both of which worked on the PC so I’m sure this isn’t a hardware issue). I couldn’t get them working in Super Meat Boy though (the only game I tried).
Conclusion
Overall, I’m stunned at how many things ran successfully, to a degree that they were actually playable. There’s plenty that doesn’t, but bearing in mind that this is running on a tiny platform under a translation layer, I’m still amazed at how good it is!
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Hi, I have a Microsoft Surface Pro running on the Snapdragon X Elite processor with 16GB Ram. I’ve installed the snap through WSL2, installed Steam, and am trying to run Shadow of Mordor through it. The refresh to –edge is much better than candidate. Having the same errors for Feral games claiming the OS, CPU and GPU are all unsupported. And actually loading the game has WSL2 terminate Steam and the game. I know this route isn’t 100% practical, but excited for what it means having Steam running on ARM.
I was hoping that FEX would provide a better compatibility layer than Microsoft’s Prism emulator, but will keep trying it. Cheers!
I was wondering if there are any plans for hardware acceleration the NVIDIA Jetson Orin series. Seem can be installed and games can run, but the graphics falls back to software rendering. I can not get FEX or steam to recognize my onboard tegra GPU. Thank you for you time.
Hi, I have a T14s x1elite with Ubuntu 25.10.
I am currently running the 7.0.0-17-qcom.x1e kernel and kde. I can confirm that Steam works flawlessly.
The games not so much. Some launch. Some don’t launch at all.
The ones I tested:
CS2 Launches, Runs. Framerate is ok BUT some lighting or shader doesn’t work at all so you end up with nasty black boxes all around the map. They are Inconsistent and I couldn’t figure out which effect in particular creates the black boxes.
Half Life 1 is incredible slow but that may be an error on my side. if someone can point me in a direction where it could go wrong, please give me an Idea.
Half Life 2 runs better but sometimes stutters but runs good most of the times.
Doom 2016 runs really well (around 40fps on medium settings)
Crisis runs slow and is sometimes laggy.
Blazing chrome runs ok but it’s not a demanding game
Bright Memory Infinite launches but I wouldn’t call it playable around 15 fps
Chris Sawyers Locomotion and OpenRCT run without a problem
Chrono Trigger runs a little slow for my taste
Cities Skylines (the first one) has a low framerate as well
Cuphead runs well. I didn’t see any problems but I didn’t play for long
Destroy all Humans was a little laggy and had lower fps than I expected and close to unplayable. mid to low 20s from what I could tell
Distance worked well enough eventhough the fps were lower than I expected but still absolutely playable
Hades seemed to work fine.
Jet Set Radio also seemed to work fine
Kerbal space program was slower than expected, if I had to guess around 15 fps but I don’t really mind that in KSP
lego builders journey works perfectly in the low spec version and works without issues in the normal version
middle earth shadow of mordor runs but is suffering a bit from lower fps than hoped and some lag but works great all in all (at least in the beginning of the game)
Mini metro works
my friend pedro also just works
Stardew Valley works great
Mass Effect legendary edition installs the ea app but doesn’t launch at all. I think that is a prolem with the EA launcher which is just…
Alice Madness Returns has some image problems from my tests (I think a quarter of the screen stayed dark)
Fallout new Vegas also had the problem of the top left quarter staying dark
Control was unplayable slow
I tried some of the Farbrausch 64k Demos and they launched but didn’t run great (we are talking minutes per frames) even for the old stuff like the popular demo
I hope this is somewhat useful and a BIG THANKS to the hard work of all the contributers
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I successfully ran Guild Wars 2 on the Gigabyte AI TOP ATOM (similar to the DGX Spark), but the frame rate is very low. At both 1080p and 2K, the FPS stays below 30, which suggests the AI TOP ATOM’s capabilities are not being fully utilized. In addition, starting from the character selection screen, there is abnormal noise/static.