Steam Link gets upgraded for Raspberry Pi 5 and Raspberry Pi Bookworm

While Valve no longer sell their Steam Link hardware, the idea lives on as an app you can install across various devices and recently Valve upgraded the Steam Link app for the Raspberry Pi platform.

The update actually went live on November 12th, and it seems a lot of us missed it, until the official Raspberry Pi blog post about it went live yesterday to go over the new release. As noted in the RPi blog post from Gordon Hollingworth, getting Steam Link running properly on the Raspberry Pi 5 took a little while since they moved away from closed-source Broadcom multimedia libraries and the move from X11 to Wayland so "a different approach was needed". Sam Lantinga from Valve, who also works on SDL, "has been working with the Raspberry Pi software team to use our hardware in the most efficient way possible".

Now the experience should be pretty good!

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From Valve's post on it the Steam Link supports the latest Raspberry Pi Bookworm operating system release in these environments:

Raspberry Pi 5

• Console and Desktop environment
• Supports H.264 at 1080p, 144 FPS
• Supports HEVC at 4K, 60 FPS and 1080p, 240 FPS

Raspberry Pi 4

• Console and Desktop environment
• Supports H.264 and HEVC at 1080p, 60 FPS (30 FPS if the display is at 4K resolution)

Raspberry Pi 3

• Console environment
• Supports H.264 at 1080p, 60 FPS

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

• Console environment
• Supports H.264 at 1080p, 60 FPS

Wired networking is highly recommended for the best streaming experience.

And these changes in the latest Steam Link release for RPi:

• Added settings recommendations based on network test results.
• Fixed the Nintendo Switch Pro controller when connected to the latest Steam client.
• Added Indonesian language support.
• Fall back to English if non-latin font downloads fail.

Are you using Steam Link on a RPi? What's your experience with it? I have an RPi4 sat collecting dust at this point, maybe I should actually blow off the dust and set it up as a Steam Link device. Although, the holidays are coming, perhaps I should treat myself to the RPi5? Decisions…