Coolio, can we get the steam client to 64 bit as well?
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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We’ve spent most of our lives living in the 32bit paradise
IIRC this has been announced as well couple of months ago.
Do you have a link to the announcement? I can't find it online :(
I tried to search as wall and came up empty - sorry! My best guess for this brainfart is that Valve dropped support for 32-bit on Mac relatively recently and that was after Mac client has been 64-bit for quite some time.
Why do you want a 64-bit client?
You need to download a bunch of i386 dependencies on Linux.
Can't imagine the relief felt by the devs.
Probably a long sighned integer of relief
It's frankly amazing that they supported it for so long!
I now feel sorry for that Fedora dev/maintainer that got thrown over the coals earlier this year for suggesting Fedora drop 32bit now that everyone seems to be, indeed, dropping 32bit.
This is a completely different thing, Steam is dropping support for 32bit operating systems. Fedora hasn't had a 32bit release since version 31. What that proposal was about was dropping 32bit packages, which would break old 32bit games (and Steam itself, as it relies on a lot of 32bit libraries as well).
Pretty sure it's just that Steam will no longer function on 32 bit machines, not that it will no longer be able to launch 32 bit binaries. The latter would make it impossible to run your old games. The fedora proposal would have running 32 bit libraries on 64 bit systems impossible as well, as it included dropping multilib.
64-bit only
Except thr client.
The first x86-64 processor came out in 2003. Technology sure does move fast.
Edit: checked my old Newegg orders. I bought my first x86-64 processor, an AMD Athlon 64 3200+, in Jan 2005. I seem to remember games were starting to pick up 64-bit support around then (I think Eve Online in particular, which I played a lot back then), so it made sense to switch.
I remember being so excited for 64bit Far Cry. Had no idea what it meant. But I was excited!
You what ?
The Pentium came out in 1994.
And when 64-bit support first came to Windows, Microsoft artificially limited the amount of RAM you could use unless you shelled out for the much more expensive editions. On Vista you were arbitrarily limited to 8 gigs with the basic edition, 16 with premium, and even the business editions had a limit of 128 gigs, a tiny fraction of the addressable space under a 64 bit architecture.
Even now there's a limit, though it's insanely high (over a terabyte) and you're unlikely to ever see it unless you're running a server on Windows instead of Windows Server (still limited, but in the dozens of terabytes) or Linux (which has a "limit" in the petabytes).
Eh, not that big of a deal. The exact same order where I got the 3200+ also had a stick of DDR 400 at all of 256MB. I don't think dual-channel memory was even a thing yet, or I'm sure I would have gone that route. That 8GB limit was a long time off.
Isn't steam a full 32 bit program ?
In that case, your OS (Windows) can run 32-bit apps. The Steam application itself won't have a 32-bit version at some point soon.
I mean, isn’t the steam client 32 bit ? I always have to enable 32 bit repos to install it
If it is then I’m surprised. I’ll have to look more into this.
Will this make steam x86_64 (instead of x86)???
That'll probably follow soon after, but I don't really see the benefit, it's not like Steam needs the extra memory or registers...