"What if Valve could bring PC games not just to its own living room consoles, but also to the Arm chips that billions of people have in their phones? What if you no longer had to wait for game developers to do the hard work of porting PC games to your phone, Mac, or other Arm hardware, because games built for desktop PCs could just work?"
"There is no official Android version of Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the best games of 2025, but that doesn't have to stop you anymore. Thanks to a stack of open-source technologies, including a compatibility layer called Proton and an emulator called Fex, games that were developed for x86-based Windows PCs can now run on Linux-based phones with the Arm processor architecture. With Proton, the Steam Deck could already do the Windows-to-Linux part; now, Fex is bridging x86 and Arm, too."
"With Proton, the Steam Deck could already do the Windows-to-Linux part; now, Fex is bridging x86 and Arm, too. This stack is what powers the Steam Frame's own ability to play Windows games, of course, and it was widely reported that Valve is using the open-source Fex emulator to make it happen. What wasn't widely reported: Valve is behind Fex itself."
Valve is enabling desktop PC games to run on Arm-based Linux phones and devices by combining the Proton compatibility layer with the Fex emulator. Proton handles Windows-to-Linux translation while Fex bridges the x86-to-Arm CPU architecture gap. The Steam Frame uses this open-source stack to play Windows games, and Valve is behind the Fex project. This technology can allow titles like Hollow Knight: Silksong to run on Android phones without official ports, potentially bringing large PC game libraries to Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, and future Arm gaming notebooks.
Read at The Verge
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]