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SDL Library Adds Support For The New Steam Controller Without Depending On Steam

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 14 May 2026 at 08:46 PM EDT. 4 Comments

Valve's new Steam Controller, which began shipping earlier this month for $99 USD, is a great piece of hardware. This high-end gaming controller is great hardware wise but what some may not enjoy about it currently is the tight integration with the Steam controller and no native OS drivers currently for use outside of Steam. As a big win today, the widely-used SDL3 gaming software/hardware abstraction library has added support for the new Steam Controller that works outside the confines of Steam.

A pull request to SDL was opened last week to add support for the new 2026 Steam Controller with its touchpads, capacitive touch for sticks, and grip sense handling. Plus updated mappings and other bits. That pull request followed a issue ticket opened in early May by a Minecraft mod developer that outlined the various limitations at present when using the new Steam Controller outside of the Steam client.

Thankfully that pull request was merged today for enabling the new Valve Steam Controller to work well with games relying on the cross-platform SDL library, regardless of having the Steam client running or not. Among the confirmations in that pull request:

"A tester confirmed that it works fine with or without Steam running. Gyro was already supported prior to this PR but I asked two testers to check and they confirmed that it works as expected."

"I am now a tester, i got my Steam Controller (2026), and i can confirm that it is indeed working as expected."

"@slouken Okay, I tested with a new Steam Controller and the changes made by this PR work fine. Using testcontroller, the touchpads (click, touch, x, y, pressure), capacitive touch for sticks, and grip sense are all functional. The mapping has been removed for now, though, so of those features, only partial touchpad support remains (touch, x, y, and pressure). The features that were already present prior to this PR are fine too (back buttons, gyro/accel, and QAM button)."

And others confirming the new Steam Controller working nicely with this latest code for the SDL library. Great seeing this happen less than two weeks after Valve began shipping the new Steam Controller for those wanting to use it outside of the Steam client.

Separately, with tonight's Steam Client beta is updated Steam Controller firmware. The new firmware should fix an issue with continuous rumble would sometimes break gyro input and another adjustment to the trackpad touch settings.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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