Steam Client Now Supports VA-API Hardware Encoding on Linux, CEG DRM Games

Steam Client Linux

Valve released today a new Steam Client update that brings some goodies for Linux gamers and games, as well as a bunch of various other enhancements, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

Good news for Linux users! The new Steam Client update adds support for VA-API hardware encoding on Linux. Users who don’t want this feature will be able to disabled it by turning off AMD and Intel hardware encoding in the Remote Play advanced host settings.

Moreover, Valve added support for DMABUF PipeWire capture on Linux, which can be enabled by launching Steam with the -pipewire-dmabuf argument, and it requires the 32-bit version of the libgbm.so.1 library.

But wait, that’s now all, as the new Steam Client release adds support for 4K capturing via PipeWire, adds initial support for games using CEG DRM through Proton, improves compatibility with recent Let’s Encrypt TLS/SSL certificate chains, and improves games streaming on Linux systems by fixing a few rare crashes.

Also for Linux users, this update improves the overall performance of the Steam Client and reduces disk I/O when updating Mesa caches and improves compatibility with some experimental Mesa versions.

In addition to these great Linux changes, the new Steam Client update improves connections to the Steam servers, improves handling of the offline mode, adds new Steam Deck glyphs to the Steam Input API, and adds support for grouping games by category when sorting a collection by Steam Review.

Under the hood, there are various bug fixes and improvements to reduce memory use when processing shader caches and the number of rendezvous signals that are needed to establish a typical P2P session. You can study the release notes for more details on these bug fixes.

Meanwhile, I recommend updating your Steam Client installations by firing up Steam Client and accessing the “Check for Steam Client Updates” option in the Steam menu.

Last updated 2 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com