Steam on Chromebook, now in beta

Broader availability

Because switching to the ChromeOS Dev channel isn’t an option for many due to its inherent instability, a big component of this release is availability in the ChromeOS Beta channel. Users of supported devices on ChromeOS Beta 108.0.5359.24 or greater will be able to set up Steam using the instructions at g.co/SteamOnChromeOS⁠.

We’ve also heard loud and clear from the community that folks want to try Steam on more devices. With this release we’re adding support for devices with AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series and Intel 12th Gen Core CPUs and lowering the minimum CPU requirement to i3 / Ryzen 3. This more than triples our supported devices, and notably includes the new cloud gaming Chromebooks⁠ from Acer, ASUS, and Lenovo.

Of course, local gaming is still heavily hardware dependent, so your experience will vary based on your device’s particular specs. We still recommend 16GB RAM and an i5 / Ryzen 5 or higher for the best experience.

Improved user experience

The most valuable aspect of the alpha release was the ability to hear directly from the community what’s working, and what’s not. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve improved usability throughout the Steam on Chromebook experience, in ways both big and small.

One big way is how we manage storage within the Steam on ChromeOS environment. Previously we managed storage based on a game’s reported installation size on Steam. However, this prevented games that download content from outside Steam from being able to access the storage they needed. Our entirely reworked solution uses a sparse disk and ballooning, and has additional benefits like improved file access performance for Proton games. Stay tuned for a future ChromeOS.dev post that dives deep into how this works.

Another area we invested in was power management. There’s nothing worse than losing game progress because you didn’t know your laptop was running low on power, so we now ensure power notifications are displayed in full screen games. We also extended battery life while gaming by reducing CPU overhead in Vulkan and DirectX titles.

And as much as we love our insert_coin ASCII art, we’ve made it much easier to start the installation process. With the #enable-borealis flag enabled in chrome://flags, search for “Steam” in the ChromeOS launcher to start the installation.

Better performance and compatibility

The Steam on Chromebook project is about bringing the best and most innovative games to Chromebook users with the performance they need to shine. That means everything from adding support for major graphics libraries like DirectX 12 and Vulkan 1.3 to improving how shaders are stored and persisted.

One of the most wide-ranging performance improvements relates to high resolution displays, which previously incurred a significant performance hit even when the game itself was running at a much lower resolution. We’ve improved our scaling system so you can now performantly play many more games on QHD and UHD displays, and see the performance benefits of reducing in-game resolution on all displays.

As a result of our work on performance and compatibility, there are now 50 new titles added to our recommended games list⁠, with more on the way. If you try Steam on Chromebook and find a great game, please let us know in a gameplay report!

Let’s play!

To get started with Steam on Chromebook beta, head to g.co/SteamOnChromeOS⁠ for setup instructions, supported devices, known issues, recommended games, and more. We look forward to your feedback as we continue our work with Valve and the entire Chromebook community.