this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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I think they will not do a new processor for another year or so. They said it is years away.
With Snapdragon announcing their M2 like arm processor for desktop, I wonder if Steamdeck and these handhelds will start to switch to ARM?
There is already work being done on x86 to arm translation for Linux.
I doubt it. x86_64 might not be efficient, but it has many instructions that aren't in ARM. Plus you'd lose out on AMD's GPU.
People are already using it to run various games.
This person is using it to play world of Warcraft on a raspberry pi.
I’m not saying it’s perfect and ready to go, but if valve puts a few engineers on it, we could have some decent performance in a few years. Just look at how far proton has come.
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Maybe after we see that new Snapdragon on Windows PC, and enough games run on ARM Windows, then Valve would consider switching chip.
I don't see why they would lead the way on that front, in addition to the software compatibility layer between Linux and Windows.
While Linux runs fine on ARM like no games do and what I have seen from the Apple ARM laptops playing X86 games isn't quite close to being there and the Steam Deck is made with gaming in mind so it doesn't make much sense IMHO. Plus the added complexity of 2 translation layers and the potential issues different games will have there.
Check out box86. There are videos of people running various games with it.
I posted a link in this thread of someone playing world of Warcraft on a pi 4.
I’m not saying that it’s ready to go today, but in a few years it will be great. Especially if valve develops for it the way they did it it proton.
I agree that translation layers will slow things down, but I don’t think it will be too terribly slow especially as more powerful chips come out.
I'm sure it can run games but it took like half a decade for Proton to be a seemless experience for the majority of games and having 2 translation layers on top of each other sounds like it could take even longer to be on the level Proton already is. Plus there's the added chance for instability of newly released games. The efficiency from ARM seems like a very minor advantage when looking at those downsides.
Both of your downsides are just things you think. Let’s wait a few years and see what the software can do.
There is a video somewhere of someone using it to play Skyrim on an old android. I don’t think it’s a bad as you believe it to be.
Both WoW and Skyrim are over a decade old, I'm more worried about newly released games but yea, of course those issues are what I think, I'm not clearvoyent. I have seen the x86 emulation on apple's ARM for modern games and I'm basing my reluctance on that but of course I can't know for sure, I'm just saying the efficiency is probably not worth it.
The same thing could be said about games in the early days of wine and proton. Now most thing run without any trouble.
Oh yea, ARM could be fully capable of emulating x86 in a decade but I don't see it being worth it in the near future for a handheld gaming machine for some gains in efficiency. Making a consumer oriented gaming device a canary in a coal mine for ARM translation sounds like an awful decision for Valve.
I think they could start work on the software now and even publicly support it. They don’t have to sell arm hardware yet, but it seems that things are heading away from x86 slowly.
I don’t know that it will be ARM as there has been interest in RISC. I think k companies will move to that and not have to deal with licensing. But performance will have to catch up to ARM.
Maybe, but this was all about a new snapdragon processor being released and if the next steam deck should be ARM based, which would be a terrible decision in my opinion. I have no personal attachment to x86 as long as the next mass adobted architecture is backwards compadible for older software.
Sorry if I was not clear. I wasn’t saying the next steam deck should switch to arm. Just down the line, they may switch to arm once the software is ready.
Linux runs on ARM though?
Linux does, but the question is if the proton layer optimization holds up for ARM processors as well.
Linux runs on anything.
I’m referring to projects like box86 that let you run x86 application on arm computers running arm versions of Linux.