Expanded Steam gaming compatibility likely coming to Arm chips with hundreds of Windows games — Valve testing ARM64 Proton compatibility layer
Expanded Steam gaming compatibility likely coming to Arm chips with hundreds of Windows games — Valve testing ARM64 Proton compatibility layer
This could bode quite well for the future of Arm devices.
From what I've understood of this - it's transpiling the x86 code to ARM on the fly. I honestly would have thought it wasn't possible but hearing that they're doing it - it will be a monumental effort, but very feasible. The best part is that once they've gotten CRT and cdecl instructions working - actual application support won't be far behind. The biggest challenge will likely be inserting memory barriers correctly - a spinlock implemented in x86 assembly is highly unlikely to work correctly without a lot of effort to recognize and transpile that specific structure as a whole.
There is an open source project that already does this a bit called box86 and box64.
I think you can find videos of people running Skyrim on arm chips like phones or maybe raspberry pi 5.
They don’t run well, but with more powerful chips and valves experience and money, I’m sure they can do it.
But does it run Doom? Using CMOV instructions only?
it's transpiling the x86 code to ARM on the fly. I honestly would have thought it wasn't possible
Apple’s been doing it for years. They try to do ahead of time transpiling wherever they can but they also do it on-the-fly for things like JITed code.
I thought FAT binaries don't work like that - they included multiple instruction sets with a header pointing to the sections (68k, PPC, and x86)
Rosetta to the best of my understanding did something similar - but relied on some custom microcode support that isn't rooted in ARM instructions. Do you have a link that explains a bit more in depth on how they did that?
A natural next step is to make a Steam Deck Mini of some sort once the compat is good enough for at least a hundred games or so.
The goal could also be PC gaming on a standalone VR headset.
I mentioned this on a related article already but it'd be interesting to see an ARM Steamdeck after seeing the performance and battery life of the Apple desktop chips. I think gaming will eventually go the way of ARM.