The ability to play hundreds of Steam games on a Chromebook is becoming easier today as Google rolls out beta support for the digital games distribution service.
Steam for Chrome OS was released as an alpha build back in March, but it would only run on seven Chromebook models. However, over the past six months Google has been gathering feedback from the alpha build and improving its usability.
The biggest changes made for the beta release include how games are stored on a Chrome OS device and power notifications being shown in full screen games. That way you won't lose progress if your battery unexpectedly dies.
Google worked on enhancing game performance by adding support for the DirectX 12 and Vulkan 1.3 graphics APIs. The development team also improved the game scaling system so "you can now performantly play many more games on QHD and UHD displays, and see the performance benefits of reducing in-game resolution on all displays."
The improvements mean that not only is Steam for Chrome OS ready for a beta release, the hardware requirements to run it have been lowered. Chrome devices using an AMD Ryzen 5000 C-series or Intel 12th-gen Core processor are now supported. The CPU requirement has been lowered to a minimum of Core i3 or Ryzen 3, and the knock-on effect of that is the number of supported devices has tripled.
Steam is now available on the Chrome OS Beta channel alongside Chrome OS 108. The full list of supported Chromebooks along with details of how to start using the latest Chrome OS beta release are available on The Chromium Projects website.