Valve may be putting the finishing touches to the Steam Frame software stack, because Lepton and FEX are now on Steam

Valve's wireless VR headset, the Steam Frame, doesn't yet have a nailed down release date beyond the vague window of 'later this year'. I've got a hunch it'll drop soon though—and not because I put any stock in the Steam Frame subreddit's wild release date rituals. No, I'm instead feeling optimistic because both Lepton and FEX are now publicly available via Steam.

Both of these pieces of software are key for the Steam Frame and required for its operation. Lepton can be thought of as a 'container' for gaming on Linux that lets it run Android games inside of it. FEX is a similarly important tool for the Snapdragon-powered device, but a smidge more complicated.

At the risk of oversimplifying, FEX takes 32-bit and 64-bit x86 games and translates them so they can be understood by Arm-based systems. The Steam Frame uses an Arm-based Snapdragon SoC, hence why FEX is required. Without it, it wouldn't be able to play most of the VR games available on Steam.

To be clear, neither Lepton nor FEX have an easily accessible Steam store page. This 'public release' is mostly good news for developers. For instance, Android devs can easily create an Android depot containing an apk for their game on Steam (the first Android game to be purchasable on Steam popped up back in November, in the form of an apk file for Walkabout Mini Golf).

From there, devs can set the apk as the launch executable for players using the Steam client. Steam Cloud will even support save data stored in the external Android data directory—that's some thought out integration.

FEX could be handy for any Arm system. Besides Valve saying it's 'definitely' already investigating an Arm-based gaming future, Nvidia's recently unveiled RTX Spark 'superchip' pairs an Nvidia GPU core with a MediaTek Arm chiplet.

Though I personally doubt an RTX Spark laptop or notebook will be the most affordable option, the SoC seems set to be a disruptive presence in the space no matter what. Our Dave has already played a native Arm build of Alan Wake 2 on an RTX Spark laptop, but that still leaves plenty of games that will benefit from Valve's work on the FEX translation layer in the future.