I do see how this could be more appealing for consumers, but aside from competing with themselves, I also would be curious about the economics. I find it difficult to believe they'd offer this, given that they already have Stadia. Speaking of performance, there’s now Vulkan 1.3 and initial DirectX 12 support to improve “how shaders are stored and persisted.” Google has improved its “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.> Then the next step is that Google Cloud offers you an on demand high end gaming machine, pay by the minute, which runs Steam on Windows x86 and has an instant VPN to your Chromebook. Meanwhile, when there’s an active game download in the background, devices will no longer sleep.

Existing alpha users need to uninstall and reinstall Steam to get these improvements. On the storage management front, ChromeOS has switched to sparse disk and ballooning for games that download content outside of Steam, while this improves file access performance for Proton titles. Power management improvements include showing low battery notifications when playing games in fullscreen, and “reducing CPU overhead in Vulkan and DirectX titles” to extend battery life. Acer Chromebook Spin 514 (CP514-3H, CP514-3HH, CP514-3WH)Īs part of Steam on ChromeOS going beta, the install process is just searching “Steam” in the launcher to start the updated install process when chrome://flags/#enable-borealis is enabled.That said, Google recommends “16GB RAM and an i5 / Ryzen 5 or higher for the best experience.” The new supported device list is below: There’s now support for AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series and 12th Gen Intel, while the minimum CPU requirement has been lowered to Core i3 and Ryzen 3.

Steam is now in beta and will just require that your Chromebook be on the Beta channel, specifically version 1.24 and newer.īesides switching to a ChromeOS channel that provides more stable day-to-day usability, Google is lowering the hardware requirements and tripling the number of supported Chromebooks. The Steam alpha launched in March on the ChromeOS Dev channel. Steam is now entering beta and supporting several more Chromebooks. After Android apps and the cloud, Steam is the third way you can play games on ChromeOS.

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