The Gaming Brief:
- Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed NVIDIA’s driver is now enabled in SteamOS’s main development tree
- Certain GeForce GPU generations can now “light up” and initialize under SteamOS, per Griffais
- A performance gap still separates this driver from NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art Windows/Linux drivers
- Full NVIDIA support isn’t expected before 2027, with Griffais comparing the timeline to years-long efforts like FEX and Qualcomm driver work
Valve has enabled NVIDIA’s GPU driver in the main development tree of SteamOS, according to Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais, speaking to IGN.
That milestone lets certain GeForce GPU generations initialize and display an image under the OS for the first time, since SteamOS has until now been effectively AMD-only. Griffais was clear that this is early-stage progress, not a finished, user-ready driver.
Pierre-Loup Griffais Confirms a Performance Rift Still Separates SteamOS From Windows
Griffais described a “little bit of a rift” between where Valve’s current NVIDIA driver implementation sits and the state-of-the-art performance NVIDIA GPUs achieve on Windows, though he added that the gap is “getting better day-to-day.”
As TweakTown notes, he compared the effort to Valve’s multi-year work on FEX, the CPU translation layer used for ARM compatibility, and its ongoing Qualcomm driver project, both of which took years to mature.
Taken together, this sets realistic expectations that NVIDIA GPUs won’t match their Windows gaming performance on SteamOS anytime soon.
AMD Hardware Has Powered Every Valve Product Until Now
Every SteamOS device Valve has shipped, the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame, runs on AMD silicon, which is why NVIDIA compatibility has never been a first-class priority for the OS until this collaboration began.
Valve first announced it was working with NVIDIA on GPU support in late June, meaning this update comes roughly three months into that partnership.
NVIDIA and Valve are reportedly working on a way to make NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers work smoothly with SteamOS’s full system updates, which handle updates differently from a typical Windows gaming PC.
Over 70% of Steam Users Run NVIDIA GPUs
As TweakTown notes, Valve’s own Steam Hardware Survey shows NVIDIA GPUs in the hands of more than 70% of PC gamers on Steam, a gap that has kept SteamOS adoption capped to Valve’s own AMD-based hardware.
Closing that gap also opens the door to future Valve products built around NVIDIA silicon rather than discrete AMD GPUs, following the pattern already seen with NVIDIA-based SoCs in devices like the RTX Spark.
