Chromebooks, or rather Chrome OS, has made a lot of advancements in recent times as a cloud based operating system, while Google has announced a new Flex version last week that could run on older computers, Chrome OS fans can now rejoice as Steam is about to be made official as a native app on the operating system.
As of now, users who wanted their Chromebook to run games on Steam can install the Linux version of it, since Chrome OS allows the installation of Linux apps through a virtualization engine, performance is therefore limited and not all games can run properly.
Reported by 9to5Google, the effort on getting Steam to work on Chrome OS has been in the works since two years ago, and it will be made on a new version of the OS that’s codenamed Borealis, where source codes have revealed that Chromebooks with 10th Gen Intel chips will support Steam.
In recent code changes on Chromium source, it consist a list of Chromebooks that will support Steam:
- Volta – Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1H)
- Volet – Acer Chromebook 515
- Voxel – Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W)
- Delbin – ASUS Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5500)
- Elemi – HP Pro c640 G2 Chromebok
- Lindar – an unreleased Chromebook from Lenovo
While there should be more higher end Chromebooks added as time goes on, the minimum requirement for a Chromebook to run Steam has also been detailed with at least an 11th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and 7GB of RAM, so you can pretty much forget about running Steam on a cheap RM1000 Chromebook if you have one, it has also been reported that NVIDIA is in the works to add discrete graphics to Chromebooks at this point of time.
This effort will finally make sense for those who spend a lot to purchase premium Chromebooks, as games can take advantage of the more powerful Intel processors in them, but it still remains to be seen on how Google intends to bring gaming to Chrome OS and challenge Windows, as not every game on Steam will work and developers will require effort to port their games over, but nonetheless this is going to be really exciting once it kicks off and who knows we will be seeing gaming Chrome OS devices soon.
Source: 9to5Google