Having launched as an alpha product in March of this year, Steam for Chromebooks has now available on the Chrome OS beta channel. Besides the hopefully increased stability and added features this brings, Chrome OS 108 also adds support for a bunch of new Chromebooks that run on Core i3 or Ryzen 3 processors.
In a nutshell, Chrome OS 108 beta brings an improved user experience, increased performance, and compatibility, and is available to those who are comfortable with betas but aren't willing to undergo the bug fest that alpha products often produce.
The Chrome OS 108 beta comes with the following changelog:
- Added various game-specific tweaks
- AMD Ryzen 5000 C-series support
- Avoid sleeping when game indicates activity via dbus
- Changed shader cache format to reduce disk footprint
- Initial DX12 support
- Enable pointer lock by default (without the #exo-pointer-lock flag)
- Fixed some cases previously resulting in GPU hangs
- i3/R3 device support
- Improved battery life from reduced CPU overhead in Vulkan and DirectX titles
- Optimized display pipeline when scaling
- Improved GPU rendering performance with transparent huge page support
- Improved handling switching between apps and full-screen
- Improved keyboard handling; for example, the launcher key now works when the Steam client is focused
- Improved window management support
- Include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai fonts
- Increased size of shader caches
- Intel 12th Gen core support
- Low battery notifications
- Mouse cursor fixes
- New installer and splash screen
- Revamped storage management
- Fixes games that install additional content outside of Steam
- Improves file access performance for Proton games
- Note: alpha users will need to uninstall and reinstall Steam so these changes can take effect
- Device no longer sleeps while games are downloading in the background.
- Shader caches persist until software update
- Show all low-battery notifications while gaming in fullscreen
- Vulkan 1.3 support
- Vulkan and GL performance improvements
- xshape support for games/launchers with transparency
Supported Devices
- Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1W)
- Acer Chromebook 515 (CB515-1W)
- Acer Chromebook 516 GE
- Acer Chromebook Spin 514 (CP514-3H, CP514-3HH, CP514-3WH)
- Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W)
- Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (CP714-1WN)
- Acer Chromebook Vero 514
- ASUS Chromebook CX9 (CX9400)
- ASUS Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5500)
- ASUS Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5601)
- ASUS Chromebook Vibe CX55 Flip
- Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition
- HP Elite c640 14 inch G3 Chromebook
- HP Elite c645 G2 Chromebook
- HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook
- HP Pro c640 G2 Chromebook
- IdeaPad Gaming Chromebook 16
- Lenovo 5i-14 Chromebook
- Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook 14
- Lenovo ThinkPad C14
Got a supported device? This is how you switch to the Chrome OS beta channel:
- On your supported Chromebook, switch to the Beta channel.
- After updating, navigate to chrome://flags. Set #borealis-enabled to Enabled.
- After restarting, open the ChromeOS launcher, search for Steam, and select the top result.
- Follow the setup flow to install Steam.
- Log in with your Steam account and start playing!
As always, let us know how it goes in the comments below.
