Hey, welcome back to the channel. All right.
Today I wanted to talk about the official steam support for Chromebooks and how
great it is. It's so much better than I thought it would be. I've been really,
really impressed with it. In fact,
the gameplay that you're watching right now was shot on my Acer Chromebook
Spin 713.
It works so well and you can even play Windows games using
Proton. Now I do wanna say, once again,
if your primary focus is gaming, get a gaming computer.
Don't get a Chromebook. You can play these games,
but you're gonna have to set the, resolution and stuff way down.
You'll have to set the effects and things way down to get a decent frame rate.
Now, I've tried this with a couple of my favorite STEAM games that have Linux
support, Seven Days to Die, and Valheim both actually work very, very well.
I did notice that if games support Vulcan and OpenCL,
you need to use Vulcan.
I had frequent crashes or the games wouldn't even start if I was using the
OpenCL option. And that comes into play with seven Days to Die.
If you try to launch Seven Days to Die just natively, it's gonna die .
It's not gonna start up and you won't be able to play.
What you have to do is start it. Select the option to select the launcher,
change it from OpenCL to Vulcan,
and then uncheck the two check boxes underneath. Uh,
that gets rid of the anti cheat, because that was also causing a problem.
But once you do that, you can launch right in and then play the game.
Now a couple other things I noticed is that the games do take quite a long time
to load and then once they're loaded up,
you kind of have to wait for some of the graphics to cache because it's really,
really choppy, uh, when that stuff is first caching. But with Seven Days to Die,
once you do that, I was getting frames right around 45 frames per second,
extremely playable. It did dip down,
especially if I went into an area where it had to load new content,
it would dip down for a few seconds and then come right back up the full speed.
It was extremely playable, and actually a pretty good experience,
especially, you know,
knowing that this is on a Chromebook that was never designed for this.
It worked really well. Now, as I mentioned before,
I did have to set the resolution and the graphic settings down.
I wanted to keep that 3x2 aspect ratio. That's on the Acer Chromebook Spin 713.
So I selected a resolution of that was three by two, but a lower resolution.
I disabled VSync and set everything to the lowest settings to get that,
you know, right around 45 frames per second.
You can mess with those settings a little bit to increase the visual quality
and still keep a decent frame rate.
But just with this default it was totally playable and still looks great on this
computer. Next up is Valheim and that just launched no problem.
I didn't have to mess with the launch settings or anything to get it to launch.
It just launched right into the game. I did again,
reduce the settings down to a lower 3x2 aspect ratio resolution and
I set most of the settings on low and I'm getting right around 35 to 40
frames per second in Valheim.
Again, extremely playable, even with those low settings looks really,
really great and it's a very, very good experience.
I wanted to try these two because these two games are, uh,
a little more graphically intensive than, some other games like CS:GO.
I also tried that, I don't have any video of that, but csgo works really,
really well too. I'm downloading Dota 2. So, if you wanna see that,
I'll do another video, let you know how that goes.
But these two games that are native to Linux, they worked really well.
And now I want to talk about a Windows game that I ran that really surprised me.
Now,
in order to get some Windows steam games running on your Chromebook or in Linux
for that matter, you need to use Steam Play. Now this,
you just go into the settings in Steam,
you turn on Steam Play and what that does is allows some of the applications to
use Proton.
At a high level Proton is just kind of a wrapper that goes around the game and
translates the Windows, calls into Linux calls,
which is essentially what we're running this on.
So that will then allow you to play some Windows games.
Now the game that I'm talking about is No Man's Sky and I was
surprised that this works as well as it does. Now, once you turn on Steam play,
install No Man's Sky and launch it,
it's gonna complain that you don't have enough ram.
It says it needs at least 8 gigs of RAM and apparently even though there's eight
gigs on the machine, there's only 6.5 that's, available to steam.
But if you just bypass that, it loads up and when you first load it,
it's gonna be extremely choppy.
Start a game or load into a game if you've been playing it for a while and
immediately go into the settings.
I'm showing you the settings on the screen right now,
but you want to reduce the resolution and reduce all of the graphical settings.
With this, I'm able to get right around 40 frames per second.
Now the resolution,
I wasn't able to find a 3x2 aspect ratio resolution,
so I'm basically just running it at 720p, but it's fine. It just puts a,
you know, letter box at the top and bottom of the screen,
but you don't even really notice it when you're playing.
No Man's Sky running on a Chromebook just blows me away.
There was a lot of gaming computers that couldn't run this game when it first
came out. Now granted,
it's a lot better optimized now than it was when it was first released,
but the fact that we can play this on a Chromebook that was never designed to
play something like this, just blows me away.
And the fact that it works as well as it does now, again, you know,
you can tweak those graphical settings to make it a little bit better by keeping
that that frame rate low. Um,
I'm gonna do some more testing on that and I'll let you know how that goes if
you're interested in that. But even with everything set at the lowest,
this game still looks great and plays great on this Acer Chromebook Spin
713. So those are the only games that I've tested at this point.
I'm happy to test other games if you're interested in that.
I can do a compilation video. If there's a bunch of,
games that you all want tested on this computer, just let me know to.
Get this going. Like I said,
there's only a few Chromebooks that this works on right now because it's an
alpha. It'll need to be an 11th generation Intel processor,
the 12th generation. The support for that is coming.
I don't have access to that yet, but um,
they are working on the support for that. So that'll be supported as well.
But if you have one of those models,
you put your Chromebook in the developer channel,
wait for that update to complete.
You have to go into the chrome flags and turn on a
borealis, flag. And then you go into terminal,
you put in a token and that token allows you to install steam.
I'll do a much more comprehensive tutorial on this.
I'll show you step by step how to go through it,
but that's the details if you want to just jump in and get it done.
So keep a lookout for that.
Make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell if you haven't,
so you know, when that comes out. Again,
if there's any other games you want me to test, let me know what those are.
And if you have any questions or comments on anything I talked about in this
video, just let me know in the comment section below.
Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next video.