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⇱ Steam Frame Using Mesa's Turnip Vulkan Open-Source Driver - Phoronix


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Steam Frame Using Mesa's Turnip Vulkan Open-Source Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 21 November 2025 at 02:28 PM EST. 103 Comments
In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa's open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.

Linux consulting firm Igalia who has long seen funded work from Valve wrote a blog post today to outline their recent efforts given last week's Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller announcement. Igalia highlighted the work they have been doing for the Steam Frame around FEX for x86/x86_64 emulation on ARM for the Qualcomm Snapdragon powered VR device. Plus the work done to Turnip for serving as the Vulkan driver on the Steam Frame.

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Igalia's blog post today formally confirms that the Mesa Turnip Vulkan driver is being used by the Steam Frame as opposed to any other Qualcomm Vulkan vendor driver. Turnip originally started as a reverse-engineered, open-source driver solution from the Freedreno developers working on the free software Qualcomm Adreno Linux driver stack.

Igalia engineers have been doing a lot of work for ensuring that Turnip will be able to handle all the rendering work and graphics performance well.

Those wishing to learn more can do so via the Igalia blog post "Helping Valve to Power Up Steam Devices."

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.