Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 876 posts

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#201

Post by nomel »

6SixTy wrote: post #110
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Would love to see it on MacOS X -- Steam works great on my Mac Mini for the games it supports, would be great to see everything run on it.

Main issue is the lack of Vulkan support on macOS. Currently, solutions like MoltenVK have to be developed to add Vulkan support, which isn't as clean as just supporting it. For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.

No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering, like all the other mainstream GPUs use.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#202

Post by Marsymars »

jmkni wrote: post #186
Marsymars wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run WoA on my daily work laptop and everything I run other than some of the junky IT-pushed apps (outlook extension to report phishing, etc.) are ARM64-native and run as expected.

That's good to hear, I remember that "holy shit" moment when I first moved to an Apple Silicon mac, I guess Microsoft are getting there but in a more hap-hazard "we'll make eventually" sort of way

That actually makes me think of the transition to high-res displays - Apple had like a year of pain when they introduced retina displays and non-updated assets would look blurry, whereas MS (and third-party devs) took years to get Windows to the point where mostly everything looks right at higher scaling levels.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#203

Post by asacrowflies »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #156
levocardia wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"

People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there. But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.

They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#204

Post by LorenDB »

KaiMagnus wrote: post #165
codeflo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.

I believe for the next Half-Life, latest rumors indicate it is actually back to 2D. During the press event last month, they were also pretty clear that no VR game is currently in development at Valve. A huge missed opportunity imo, but maybe playing HL3 on a theater sized screen is nice enough.

Some rumors from ~1yr ago indicated they were looking into making it an asymmetric co-op game where one player would be Gordon Freeman on PC and one would be Alyx in VR. Of course, they could have dropped that by now.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#205

Post by franczesko »

alemanek wrote: post #105
EA-3167 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more than "little motivation" if we're being honest. Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably) cut them out. Their very clever approach has been a full end-run around the OS by using Proton, which I'm sure genuinely thrilled Apple... as long as Valve is only doing that to MS. Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same…

Apples biggest weakness is games. But it has a pretty large install base when compared to Linux (not counting phones or servers here).Seems like a win/win. Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market. I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or…

>Valve gets a large target market

They don't need Apple for that. People who game already game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones with their own at some point

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#206

Post by LorenDB »

aloisdg wrote: post #122
jonny_eh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with their new hardware in 2026.

Imagine HL3, Portal 3 et L4D3 but all linux only. oh my

Orange Box 2. Then in another few decades we'd get Orange Box: Alyx.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#207

Post by renewiltord »

levocardia wrote: post #147
adverbly wrote: post #98

Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"

That's more a property of the community than of the company. If the community were differently inclined then the comments would be about how Valve is making money by addicting children to gambling and so on and so forth.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#208

Post by wafflemaker »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #17
jchw wrote: post #11

> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future. Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.

> though not all developers elect to enable it. Looking at you Rust. Edit: And the rest of you. If even Microsoft's Masterchief Collection supports it, I Don't understand why everyone else does not. https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Wow, what a cool site. Just learned that Hunt: Showdown is supported in Linux. And it wasn't the first time I checked. Will love to give it a try.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#209

Post by butz »

12_throw_away wrote: post #168
the__alchemist wrote: post #40

Does anyone know what the limfac is? The machine code produced is of course different on different CPU arches, but isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about. The exception I see is if SIMD intrinsics.

> isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about. But game devs (at least of a certain type) are notorious for thinking about low-level hardware performance right from the start. As a class I'm pretty sure game devs use godbolt much, much more than your typical developer.

Sadly, nowadays very few, if any, game developers care about performance or optimizations. Look at recent headline about "Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB" and it was done by simply deduplicating assets. Gone are the days of finding inredible ways to use less opcodes that game would feel smoother.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#210

Post by nialv7 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #156
levocardia wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"

People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there. But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.

Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar).

Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...

[1]: https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review

Post reply on HN