Google has announced that users running ChromeOS 108 on the Beta channel can now install a beta version of Steam, following a seven-month period where it was considered alpha software. With this beta release of Steam, it becomes available more broadly, features an improved user experience, has better performance, and is compatible with more of your games.
With this release, users will only need to be on the ChromeOS Beta channel, rather than the Dev channel that was required before. Chromebooks with AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series and Intel 12th Gen Core CPUs are now supported, and the minimum CPU requirement has been lowered to i3 / Ryzen 3. This triples the number of supported Chromebooks and includes support for new cloud gaming Chromebooks from Lenovo, Acer, and ASUS.
With the new Steam beta, scaling in games has been improved, so you can play many games better on QHD and UHD displays. As a result of the work that has gone in over the last several months, Google has expanded its list of recommended games to 50 titles, with more coming. DirectX 12 and Vulkan 1.3 support has also been added for improved performance.
The full changelog is as follows:
- Added various game-specific tweaks
- AMD Ryzen 5000 C-series support
- Avoid sleeping when game indicates activity via dbus
- Changed shader cache format to reduce disk footprint
- Initial DX12 support
- Enable pointer lock by default (without the #exo-pointer-lock flag)
- Fixed some cases previously resulting in GPU hangs
- i3/R3 device support
- Improved battery life from reduced CPU overhead in Vulkan and DirectX titles
- Optimized display pipeline when scaling
- Improved GPU rendering performance with transparent huge page support
- Improved handling switching between apps and full-screen
- Improved keyboard handling; for example, the launcher key now works when the Steam client is focused
- Improved window management support
- Include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai fonts
- Increased size of shader caches
- Intel 12th Gen core support
- Low battery notifications
- Mouse cursor fixes
- New installer and splash screen
- Revamped storage management
- Fixes games that install additional content outside of Steam
- Improves file access performance for Proton games
- Note: alpha users will need to uninstall and reinstall Steam so these changes can take effect
- Device no longer sleeps while games are downloading in the background.
- Shader caches persist until software update
- Show all low-battery notifications while gaming in fullscreen
- Vulkan 1.3 support
- Vulkan and GL performance improvements
- xshape support for games/launchers with transparency
To get started with Steam on ChromeOS, just head over to the setup page and follow the instructions. You’ll be able to find out here if your device is supported, learn about known issues, and see recommended games.
Source: ChromeOS Dev
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