Valve won't add AMD's ROCm to SteamOS, saying it is too large for the system image

Valve has turned down a request to add AMD's ROCm and HIP libraries to SteamOS. "This request is too large for the base image," Valve replied on October 18, closing it as a duplicate of a request it rejected in 2023.

Valve's own image of the Steam Controller, from its Steam store page. Image: Valve

ROCm is AMD's toolkit for running general computing work on its graphics cards, its answer to Nvidia's CUDA. The owner who made the request wanted it so Blender could render with AMD's newest Radeon RX 9000 cards. Without it, Blender on SteamOS falls back to the much slower CPU.

The same answer as 2023

Valve pointed to its decision from January 2023, when a Steam Deck owner asked for ROCm for Blender and Stable Diffusion. Back then Valve said one required package alone took 2.9 GB, far too much for something that would help "a small subset of desktop users and no games". It also said ROCm was not ready to be packaged as a Flatpak.

That reasoning was about a handheld. The new request comes from a desktop user who wants to build game assets and test games on the same system, but Valve did not revisit its figures.

A screenshot from Squad on its own Steam store page. Image: Offworld

Workarounds remain

ROCm can still run on SteamOS, either inside Distrobox containers or by unlocking SteamOS's read-only system files, though the requester notes that every major update undoes the second option. Owners hit the same wall when a kernel feature Waydroid needs went missing, until Valve restored it.

A second screenshot from the same Squad gallery. Image: Offworld

AMD's own ROCm support has been inconsistent as well: its latest Windows driver lists only Radeon cards, while its release notes include nine Ryzen processor series.