Canonical has promoted its Steam snap for ARM64 systems to stable release. The update bundles FEX-Emu to run the x86-only Steam client on ARM hardware and adds a new thunking option for graphics calls.
The promotion follows nearly five months of testing across multiple ARM64 devices. It introduces FEX library forwarding as a configurable feature that forwards OpenGL and Vulkan calls directly to native ARM64 libraries to reduce emulation overhead. Canonical tested the release on NVIDIA DGX Spark and GB10 devices, Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops including the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s and Dell XPS 9345, and Radxa Orion O6 and O6N hardware. All showed good performance with popular games. Mitchell Augustin, who announced the update, outlined a release cycle moving versions from edge to candidate and then stable. He also plans to rebuild the snap around Valve's native ARM64 Steam client once Proton 11 exits beta.
