GoKawiilIf you’ve been paying close attention over the past year and change, you’ll quickly learn that while PC gaming is clearly struggling from apocalyptic component pricing, players are slowly looking to alternative platforms and operating systems to play games on. Valve’s Steam Deck is a primary cause for this success and has spawned a breed of x86-based handheld devices over the past few years. While Sony is reportedly developing its own handheld, Valve has been hard at work developing its own hardware ecosystem, or at least trying to, no thanks to the ongoing DRAM and NAND pricing devastation.
Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame will make use of an ARM-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, notably differing from the x86-based chips inside the now four-year-old Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. Alongside choosing an Arm-based chip for its upcoming VR headset, the company has been quietly contributing to a translation layer named FEX.
What is FEX?
FEX or FEX-Emu, translates raw x86 instructions into ARM64 instructions, with Proton handling the software and OS-level translations from Windows into something that can be understood by Linux. When FEX and Proton work in tandem, it means that Arm-based chips could very well run many “full-fat” games stored in your Steam Library.
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Valve has been funding the development of FEX for years, which is, in itself, open source. As such, over the past year or so, development has started on getting FEX up and running on Android-based devices. One such example is GameNative, a slick open-source app that can tap into your Steam Library and allow you to make use of FEX (and Proton) to run games. There are additional apps that perform similar functions, such as GameSir’s Gamehub, which is a closed-source alternative that, in late 2025, came under fire for its capture of sensitive user telemetry data. So, be sure to research these options wisely if you want to try something like this out for yourself.
So, with that all in mind, let’s try to push current Android hardware to its limits and see just how well FEX is shaping up.
Setup
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
Of course, many Android devices might not be up to the task of running AAA, x86-based games. As it happens, I was shopping for a new Android tablet, and lucked out finding a deal on a used RedMagic Astra Gaming tablet, which is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 4 SoC, Adreno 830 GPU, and 24 GB of LPDDR5T RAM. The device is also equipped with active cooling, which is a rarity in smaller Android tablets.
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