An open-source app called DroidDeck is letting Snapdragon-powered Android devices run Valve's Steam client and Windows PC games locally, with no streaming from a PC or the cloud involved. YouTuber ETA Prime tested it on a RedMagic 11 Pro with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 16 GB of memory, where Cyberpunk 2077 ran at around 60 FPS on medium settings. Skyrim Special Edition hit a similar figure at 720p, while Hogwarts Legacy was tougher on the phone and sat around 40 FPS even with lower settings and FSR.
Other solutions like Steam Link stream games from another PC, whereas DroidDeck runs them on the device itself. It loads Valve's ARM64 Linux Steam client in Big Picture mode as a regular Android app, and Windows games go through Valve's ARM64 Proton with x86 translation. Projects like Armada instead replace Android with SteamOS entirely, and DroidDeck needs neither that nor root access.
It also handles GPU driver switching, AMD FSR and Snapdragon GSR upscaling, and frame generation through Lossless Scaling. DroidDeck needs Android 9 or newer and fully supports Adreno 730 and newer GPUs, while Adreno 6xx is experimental and Mali, Xclipse, Power VR, and Adreno 710 are not supported. The runtime takes up about 3 GB, and users have to turn off Android's child-process restriction before Steam will launch.
Results vary, as Video Cardz got the app running on a Mangmi Pocket Max but could not start Raft. Valve also does not officially support Steam for Linux on Arm, and the project says it is not affiliated with Valve, so some rough edges are expected.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing