Valve wants Steam to squash Arm gaming stutter before you even hit play

A powerful gaming PC can still stutter like hell. Now imagine your processor having to translate the game’s instructions while you’re playing it.

That’s one of the challenges Valve faces in its fascinating push to bring Windows games to Arm chips. And the company has a clever plan to tackle it before you even hit Play.

“FEX code caching is vital for frame time consistency,” Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told PCWorld in an interview. “In the future, it will also be integrated with Steam’s Pre-Caching feature, so that cached code is available even prior to the first local run of an application.”

That’s a nifty trick when you’re trying to make thousands of Windows games run on processors they were never designed for. And it dovetails with a broader industry push to stamp out one of PC gaming’s most infuriating problems.

Translating games without the hiccups

FEX is a crucial piece of Valve’s ambitious effort to break Steam free from traditional gaming PCs. Most Windows games are built for x86 processors from AMD and Intel. Arm chips speak a different instruction language, so FEX translates x86 code into Arm instructions as games run.