Valve continue working on NVIDIA support

15 Sep 2026 at 7:15 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Valve released two new testing builds with SteamOS 3.8.27 Beta and the much bigger SteamOS 3.9.1 Preview. For both of these if you want to try them out, you need to opt-in via the Settings > System > System Update Channel.

For SteamOS 3.8.27 Beta there's only one change.

SteamOS 3.8.27 Beta

• Fixed a rare issue where fan speed would revert to BIOS control until a reboot, resulting in higher than normal fan speeds.

And for SteamOS 3.9.1 Preview, it bundles in some more fixes on top of the original bigger SteamOS 3.9 Preview initial release:

New in SteamOS 3.9.1

General

• Fixed a system crash when launching Forza Horizon 6 on Legion Go 2.
• Fixed an issue causing frame limits to result in lower than intended FPS on certain external displays.
• Fixed issues with suspend/resume on systems with RDNA1 or RDNA2 based dedicated GPUs.
• Fixed a regression in seamless boot causing the boot logo to disappear prior to the Steam startup animation.
• Fixed a rare issue where fan speed would revert to BIOS control until a reboot, resulting in higher than normal fan speeds on Steam Deck.
• Security and stability updates.

Developer

• Fixed verbose-mode boots, triggered by the steamos-bootdebug utility or chainloader menu, having their output hidden by plymouth.
• Updated included renderdoc version.

All the other changes from SteamOS 3.9:

General

• Updated Arch Linux base.
• Updated Desktop Mode from Plasma 6.4.3 to Plasma 6.7.3:
  • For more information, see:
    https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.7.0/.
    https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.6.0/.
    https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.5.0/.

Misc

• Updated the bootloader to improve compatibility with certain motherboards.
• The Desktop Mode lockscreen is no longer prevented from being explicitly enabled in settings (but remains off by default).

Developer

• Switched WiFi backend to wpa_supplicant by default for new installations, improving compatibility with various WiFi networks
  • Enhanced wpa_supplicant to support fast WiFi reconnect on resume from sleep, previously only available in the iwd backend.
  • Known issue: Existing installations will continue to use iwd unless manually enabled in Developer Settings.
• Linux kernel rebased on Linux 7.2.
• Added preliminary support for hibernation, not yet exposed in Game Mode UI
  • Enhanced Linux kernel hibernation support to enable interrupting hibernate requests and fixed various driver issues.
• Various scripts and packages have been renamed from `steamos-` to `holo-`, with aliases to the former names where appropriate.
• Improved support for running SteamOS as a VM guest with accelerated graphics (virtio-gpu, venus).

As for NVIDIA support with SteamOS, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke to IGN to confirm it's still being worked on but will take time:

"Yeah, we're working on it hard. It's definitely at the top of our list. It's one of those things just like FEX and working on the Qualcomm driver, it just takes years. We've done a few things like we've enabled the driver now in the main tree of SteamOS, so you can get things to light up on certain generations, but in terms of the performance difference between that driver and where the state of the art is, there's definitely still a little bit of a rift that we're trying to work on, but it's getting better day-to-day."

🌐 External Sources: store.steampowered.com, store.steampowered.com, ign.com Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Steam Machine, SteamOS, Misc, NVIDIA, Steam, Valve 9 Likes Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:Age Verification for Steam rolls out in Australia requiring a Credit CardWine 11.16 brings more ARM64 support improvementsSTAR WARS Zero Company is out nowThe cloud gaming dream is dying - XBOX places limits on XBOX Cloud Gaming All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.