TechTuber and gaming aficionado ETA Prime recently showed off DroidDeck, an app that allows SteamOS and Steam games to run natively on Android devices. To be clear, this is an app that allows your Android device to run your Steam games on it: No PC, no streaming, and no root access needed.
What Is DroidDeck?
DroidDeck is essentially an open-source app, easily downloadable via GitHub. As with all tech-related tinkering, there are some requirements to getting DroidDeck running on Android devices.
Firstly, your device will need to be running on Android 9 or newer, and run with an Adreno 730 GPU or newer. ETA Prime gave an essentials list of chipsets that would effectively run DroidDeck. To be safe, as long as your device is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the app should have little problems running.
Second, while the app runs natively on Android, the instructions say that you need to turn off the “Restrict child processes” in the Developer options. Basically, you need to enable developer mode on your Android device to pull this off.
Much like the Steam Frame, DroidDeck runs Steam games through Valve’s ARM64 proton, along with FEX for the X86 to ARM translation layer. This is the handshake that allows games to be run on ARM-based systems, and in this case, Android devices.
Full-On PC Gaming On Android
In ETA Prime’s case, they showed off DroidDeck running on their Nubia RedMagic 11 Pro, which is powered by Qualcomm’s current king-of-the-hill, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC, along with 16GB of RAM, plus watercooling. Their games list included Cyberpunk 2077, Skyrim Special Edition, Ghost of Tsushima, and Hogwarts Legacy.
As per their findings, Cyberpunk 2077 ran at an average of 60 fps at 720p, while Skyrim achieved similar performance metrics too. Ghost of Tsushima fared a little worse at 48 fps at 720p with medium settings, but that pushed up to 60 with FSR and Frame Generation active.
On a related note, DroidDeck support isn’t just limited to SteamOS; it also supports GOG, Epic Games, and Amazon Games, all of which can be added to Steam as non-Steam games, and launched through Proton. Additionally, it also supports other upscalers besides AMD’s FSR, including Snapdragon GSR and Lossless Scaling.
