Valve has taken another step to ensure that SteamOS is no longer an operating system primarily for AMD hardware. The company has incorporated NVIDIA drivers into the system’s main development branch. On several generations of GeForce, it allowed you to initialize the graphics card and display an image on the screen.
That sounds like a win, but it’s still far from full support. Valve admits outright that there’s still a significant performance gap between its own driver implementation and the current NVIDIA stack for Linux, and the whole thing lags behind the Windows driver as well. The team continues to work on it, and according to the developers, the situation is improving almost daily. For Valve, NVIDIA’s support is particularly important: the company’s graphics cards account for a significant share of the Steam user market. Additionally, SteamOS is moving beyond Steam Deck and is ready to run on desktops, third-party portable devices, and new Valve hardware.
No date has been set for the full release of NVIDIA support.
