Steam is making a big push for being more accessible. Will now run on lower-end CPUs
While Chromebooks aren’t exactly put hand in hand with gaming, some units are relatively well equipped, featuring last-gen CPUs and iGPUs which have allowed for some gaming to be done.
ChromeOS has been allowing users to download Steam and install games for some time now, but the requirements were pretty high, with laptops only powered by Core i7 and Core i5 processors or their AMD-equivalents.
This means that most Chromebook users, who purchased more affordable devices with lower-end hardware, were simply out of luck.
Now, Google feels ready to expand the field of notebooks that are eligible for testing, with the requirements lowering to a minimum of a Ryzen 3 or a Core i3 CPU. There are still some caveats, however, as your Intel-powered Chromebook needs to use 11th Gen chips or higher.
Basically, if your notebook is from 2020 or before, you can’t take part in the testing. You would also need at least 8GB of RAM, which feels like the minimum for any laptop in 2021 or 2022. Steam for ChromeOS is still in Alpha testing, but the widening of the supported devices is a good sign, as it shows that both Google and Valve are putting in the work.
Here are some of the cooler Chromebooks which would cover these requirements:
Author: Severin Kolakov
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