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Linux developers have successfully enabled Steam to run on platforms based on the RISC-V architecture. Notable games such as “The Witcher 3” and “Crysis” can now be played smoothly. It is important to note that this achievement is not due to a significant breakthrough in porting the Steam client to the RISC-V architecture, but rather thanks to the continuous improvement in the quality of the felix86 emulation project, which allows the Steam client and some games to run on RISC-V.
The Felix86 blog mentioned that the emulator has begun to support playable AAA-level Windows games, marking a significant breakthrough for the project. Additionally, developers praised Felix86’s “user-friendliness,” stating that running games with it is both fast and easy. There have also been other notable improvements in AppImage support and file system emulation.
In an email sent to GamingOnLinux, developers revealed more exciting information. One enthusiastic developer wrote: “We have even managed to get the Linux version of the Steam client running, which means that games with Steam Digital Rights Management (DRM) can also be played on RISC-V through felix86.”
RISC-V: The Rising Star Powering Billions of Devices
In the competition for processor architectures in 2025, RISC-V is considered a rising star, already showing its potential with frequent highlights. In November 2023, we reported predictions that by 2030, over 16 billion devices worldwide will adopt the RISC-V architecture. Recently, it has been announced that NVIDIA will join the RISC-V camp, and China is also vigorously promoting the adoption of this open-source instruction set architecture (ISA).
So far, RISC-V’s greatest success has been its widespread adoption in embedded systems and Internet of Things devices, with these chips quietly embedded in billions of devices, yet remaining largely unknown. Now, with projects like DC-ROMA, Milk-V Megrez development boards, and even Framework exploring RISC-V, this platform is gradually coming into the view of enthusiasts and developers.
Last September, we discussed the ongoing efforts to bring Steam games to the Arm platform. When it was discovered that Valve was developing an ARM64 version of Proton called “proton-arm64ec-4” with good compatibility, players in the Arm camp were filled with anticipation.
However, at present, Apple chips are the frontrunners for running Steam games on the Arm platform. Just last month, Valve released the first native Steam client beta supporting Apple Silicon. However, without emulation layers like Felix86 and with Rosetta 2 gradually being phased out, there is still a long way to go for Steam on Apple Silicon to become an attractive gaming platform.
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