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

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

#251

Post by xbmcuser »

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.

The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders

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

#252

Post by Karliss »

the__alchemist wrote: post #78
jitl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This system allows playing unmodified production x86 executables on arm64. It doesn’t have anything to do with the developers.

That's great, but begs the question: why not just compile the games for ARM?

It's a chicken and egg problem. Lack of ARM PCs due to software support, lack of software support due to negligible market share.

Same argument can be applied to Linux. Why not just compile the software for Linux. Not that the most companies couldn't do it, it's just not worth the hassle for 1-3% of userbase. Situation with Linux also demonstrates that it's not enough to have just the OS + few dozen games/software for which hardware company sponsored ports, not even support for 10 or 30% of software is enough. You need a support for 50-80% of software for people to consider moving. Single program is enough reason for people to reject the idea of moving to new platform.

Only way to achieve that is when a large company takes the risk and invests in both, build a modern hardware and also builds an emulation layer to avoid the complete lack of software. Emulator makes the platform barely usable as daily driver for some users. With more users it makes sense for developers to port the software resulting in positive feedback loop. But you need to reach a minimum threshold for it to happen.

Compilation for ARM isn't the biggest issue by itself. You also need to get all the vendors of third party libraries you use to port them first. Which in turn might depend on binary blobs from someone else again. Historically backwards compatibility has been a lot more relevant on windows, but that's also a big weakness for migration to new architecture. A lot more third party binary blobs for which the developers of final software don't have the source code maybe somewhere down the dependency tree not at the top. A lot more users using ancient versions of software. Also more likely that there developers sitting on old versions of Visual Studio compared macOS.

If you compare the situation with how Apple silicon migration happened. * Releasing single macBook model with new CPU is much bigger fraction of mac hardware market share compared to releasing single Windows laptop with ARM cpu.

* Apple had already trained both the developers and users to update more frequently. Want to publish in Apple Appstore your software need to be compiled with at least XCode version X, targeting SDK version Y. Plenty of other changes which forced most developers to rebuild their apps and users to update so that their Apps work without requiring workarounds or not stand out (Gatekeeper and code signing, code notarization, various UI style and guideline changes)

* XCode unlike Visual Studio is available for free, there is less friction migrating to new XCode versions.

* More frequent incremental macOS updates compared to major Windows versions.

* At the time of initial launch large fraction of macOS software worked with the help of Rosetta, and significant fraction received native port over the next 1-2 years. It was quickly clear that all future mackBooks will be ARM.

* There are developers making macOS exclusive software for which the selling point is that it's macOS native using native macOS UI frameworks and following macOS conventions. Such developers are a lot more likely to quickly recompile their software for the latest version of macOS and mac computers or make whatever changes necessary to fit in. There is almost no Windows software whose main selling point is that it is Windows native.

* Apple users had little choice. There was maybe 1 generation of new Intel based Apple computers in parallel with ARM based ones. There are no other manufactuers making Apple computers with x86 CPUs.

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

#253

Post by enneff »

Draiken wrote: post #200
tapoxi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that Valve uses a user space anti-cheat (VAC) for Counter-Strike 2, but the competitive community overwhelmingly rejects that and ops to use a third-party Windows-only kernel mode anti-cheat (FACEIT).

I mean, people are dumb. Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct. Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spywa…

The marketing works because online games get destroyed by cheats. Losing in online games can be full of “feel bad” moments, even without cheaters (network issues, cheesy tactics, balance issues). To think that your opponent won because they outright cheated just makes you wanna quit.

I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”

It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder for people to get into the games in the first place though so I don’t know if developers would really want to go that way.

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

#254

Post by 12_throw_away »

butz wrote: post #209
12_throw_away wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But ... all that duplication was being _done on purpose to achieve better performance_ due to low-level concerns about access times on legacy HDDs?

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

#255

Post by chuckadams »

babypuncher wrote: post #179
chuckadams wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPTK is mostly a bunch of developer tools for converting to Metal, and the closest it gets to anything like Proton is an "evaluation environment" that is nothing close to Proton's performance. Proton is mostly Wine, and Wine on macOS uses MoltenVK, so it's probably easier to just port Proton.

Direct3D -> Vulkan -> Metal is quite the translation layer sandwich, I wonder if that would have a meaningful impact on performance

The D3D -> VK layer actually seems to speed things up, so maybe we'll just end up back where we started :)

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

#256

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

robrtsql wrote: post #138
JoshTriplett wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/rust, the subreddit for the Rust language, regularly (every 1-2 days at most) gets posts meant for /r/playrust, the subreddit for the Rust game. I genuinely don't know how people manage to get as far as posting without noticing where they are.

It’s probably because the “create a Reddit post” form doesn’t require you to even visit the subreddit you are posting to. It DOES show you the rules/sidebar of the subreddit you are about to post to (for /r/rust it includes a link to /r/playrust for the gamers) but apparently many aren’t seeing that.

"Banner blindness" applies to the rules/sidebar. The user sees it, notices it's not what they're looking to interact with, and ignores it. The same thing happens for modal dialogues where the user will click whatever button makes the message go away without bothering to read the message, only the button text.

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

#257

Post by foresto »

tencentshill wrote: post #211
craftkiller wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

They sold the Deck hardware at a loss, so I hope you've bought several full-price games to play on it since.

Has that been confirmed? Got a link?

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

#258

Post by WithinReason »

bigwheels wrote: post #89

Any leads on when the next generation of Steam Deck will be released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it will be more like 2026. Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more. As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. T…

MLID says 2028+: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Srvv_Zd_k4c

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

#259

Post by nish__ »

xbmcuser wrote: post #251
TulliusCicero wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders

Exactly. Going public is like leaving your baby to be raised by wolves.

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

#260

Post by tombert »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #245
tombert wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility. Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t b…

If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).

Oh it’s not for lack of trying on my end. I tried getting them to play with OnlyOffice, and they said it was worse.

If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it.

In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.

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