Steam games on Jetson TX2

Hello,

I’m considering Tegra X2 and the new Xavier SoC as hardware for a gaming console.
I’m wondering if someone tried to install a Steam for Linux on Jetson TX2 and run some 3D games from it? If someone is going to try it, could you post the settings and FPS, please?
I’m curious about the graphics driver out of the box performance benchmark for 3D games.

Thanks

I have not tried, but it is unlikely any of the games could run on a Jetson without porting. None of the x86 games would run, nor any of the 32-bit ARM games. 64-bit ARM would have a chance, but it is still likely something would need porting.

Hello linuxdev,
Tank you for reply!

Would you like to run a couple of games if I will package them for ARM64 Linux with Unreal Engine?

unlikely
It is unlikely that Xavier / Jetson TX2 will be a good fit for game development. I would suggest you using a workstation with GPU instead. It will have more computational power, and it will also run Windows that will support game development environment.
IMHO

Hello Andrew,

I’m considering the SoC itself, not Jetson dev board as a piece of hardware. Nintendo Switch successfully uses Tegra X1, which is a proof of concept. For my purposes, I need power-efficient hardware and what you suggest doesn’t fit this requirement. I need some data on the driver performance to go further.

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I suspect that any games packaged with Unreal would be more problematic than it sounds. Are you trying to decide if it is worth purchasing a TX2 based on this? FYI, the Jetson TX2 runs Linux, the various appliances run Android, and the actual environments (aside from the Linux kernel) are likely completely foreign to each other.

Unreal Engine supports Aarch64 Linux Cross-compiling [url]https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Platforms/Linux/GettingStarted[/url], why should it be problematic? What I’m going to do is download game sources from Unreal Examples and package it using Aarch64 cross-compiler.
I didn’t get your point regarding Android though. What I need is Aarch64 Linux and drivers for it, and Nvidia is the only who provides that for their hardware (which is obviously capable of running high-end games according to the specs).
I couldn’t find any mentions on the internet about native 3D games performance, so I came here. If none did this before and wouldn’t like to try, I will buy it and try out on my own as I need this data.

It isn’t the architecture which makes it difficult, it’s the runtime environment. The kernel itself provides certain system calls, and these can be the same across a large number of platforms. However, the libraries and linking and support within the environment itself can be vastly different across platforms using the same architecture. Android and Linux in general mostly have no portable C/C++ applications unless you both recompile and also edit code for completely different libraries. Android is the biggest example because it has a Linux kernel, but you can go to a finer detail and find that something like Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 applications won’t necessarily run on both without supplying missing dependencies which conflict with the existing library versions. Practically no application on 14.04 would run directly on 18.04 without significant changes, and they are both Ubuntu. Surrounding environment is why I say it would probably be difficult. Games tend to have more dependencies than special purpose programs.

If you can build the Unreal engine, then your chances go up. I remember some people talking about getting Unreal going, and I think it was a success (but I don’t remember where it was discussed…somewhere in these forums). What I’d suggest is by starting a thread on Unreal engine (such as git source locations and READMEs, so on). When that is established it would become worth talking about specific games compiled against Unreal. If you can add a link to something you’ve built then we could try that on a TX2.

If you’ve built a game depending on Unreal I’ll suggest running “ldd” on it and listing those so we can search for what packages provide those.

This thread hasn’t been updated since 2018 but has anyone had any luck getting SteamOS + Linux to run on TX2?

I have not looked at this in a long time, but perhaps by now there is a 64-bit ARM release? Running 32-bit ARM would still be as much of a problem now as it was a couple of years ago, but more 64-bit ARM support exists today.

This thread hasn’t been active since Jun 2020, it is now 2021 and I am very interested in this project. I would also love to try and run some games, not only on the Jetson Xavier TX2 but also on the Jetson nano, I know that the settings would have to be lowered in games.

I am also looking to make a cheap console, any help trying to figure this out would be very helpful

For gaming on the Jetson Nano, I’ve been using this project. Nvidia Jetson Nano

This is a project basically to get RetroPie running on the Jetson Nano, it would be really great to get Steam Link running, but you might like to try the various Emulators to see what they can do. I’ve had a lot of luck with it, and I used my Epilogue Gameboy Operator to get my Gameboy Cartridges (they don’t run directly from the Operator, I used it’s backup function) to run on the Jetson Nano with it.

@miguelmcnamara22