How Steam is running these days on a Chromebook

It’s been quite a while for me on this one. With NVIDIA GeForce NOW being so good, I’ve largely lost the appetite for seeing Steam games on Chromebooks finally emerge from the shadows of Beta. I still would love the idea of having a few titles right on my device and really love the concept of extending ChromeOS’ abilities to localized gaming, but the road has been very long and with cloud gaming getting so good, I’ve largely taken a passive spectator approach to the final arrival of Steam games on Chromebooks.

A quick test today

But every once and a while, my interest is piqued. Usually it revolves around a positive story about a device like the Steam Deck, where a game that once couldn’t be played on it now performs quite well thanks to Steams continually-updated Proton compatibility layer. Being the exact same compatibility layer we have for Steam on Chromebooks, these stories always have me wondering how things are progressing behind the scenes for ChromeOS.

So today, I decided to take it all for a spin. I’m using a more-tested, still-fast Acer Chromebook 516 GE for the task, and as expected, I turned on the Steam container with ease by simply clicking the Steam logo in my app drawer. After just a couple minutes of setup, I was up and running, and I downloaded 3 games to give me a real idea of how things are progressing.

• The first is Counter-Strike: Source. This title is older and requires very little on the processor side to work well. We used to play it often on Chromebooks years ago via Crouton, so the Steam container should easily run it.
• Second up is Counter-Strike 2, a new version of the game that uses modern graphics and lighting and will really push the container and the device.
• And finally, I downloaded Apex Legends – a game that, unlike the first two, is a Windows title and is far more intensive to run. It will push the Steam container, my Chromebook, and the Proton compatibility layer to the edge for certain if it even runs. So here goes.

Counter-Strike: Source

As I expected, Counter-Strike: Source ran like absolute butter. Early on, even games this simple would hiccup and stutter quite a bit in ‘Borealis’ (the code name for Steam on Chromebook), but not today. Even with most settings cranked up, HDR on, motion blur, and anti-aliasing, the Acer 516 GE handled everything very nicely and the game ran as well as I could possibly hope. Pretty sweet!

Counter-Strike 2

Counter-Strike 2 started off with a clear signal that things may be a bit tougher with this sort of title. Upon opening the game, I was met with a pop-up box that said Steam needed to process Vulkan shaders, and this took about 25 minutes. Clearly, the graphic stress was going to be quite a bit tougher with this more-modern game.

And when I finally launched it, it loaded and I could barely navigate the menu. Once I was able to turn down the resolution (it seems happiest at 1/4 of the full QHD we have on the 516 GE, so 1280×800 was where I landed) and crank the settings to “low”, I could actually initiate a game. But that was about it.

Once in a game, the framerate was barely pushing single digits, and as expected with this poor of a performance, the game is totally unplayable. I was hoping with the extremely lowered graphic settings that I’d at least be able to move around a bit, but nothing was really working. So, it was on to Apex Legends, which I now thought would be a complete failure.

Apex Legends

But much to my surprise, that didn’t turn out to be the case. Instead, after very little startup time, I was successfully able to not only launch Apex Legends; I was able to play it, too.

Granted, I had to crank most of the graphic settings down to low, and at least turn things down to 1080p, but after doing so, I was getting smooth framerates and a game that is totally playable. And that’s a little bonkers when you consider what is happening with all this.

To play Apex Legends on this Chromebook, you have to run a modified container for Steam in ChromeOS, and that container is running software that is then running a compatibility layer for a Windows-based game to be able to run them in Linux. It’s a bit of a Russian Nesting Doll situation, and the fact that it works at all is impressive: let alone the fact that I was actually able to play the game.

And while I’d still lean towards GeForce NOW for my Chromebook gaming at this point, I’m impressed with the improvements I’m seeing with Steam on Chromebook. Sure, the Counter-Strike 2 test was a complete and utter failure, but the unexpected performance of Apex Legends gives me hope that Steam on Chromebooks is coming along to a place where it can be quite viable and handle simpler titles more suited to most Chromebooks’ simpler hardware. And that’s pretty encouraging.