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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

#441

Post by Miraste »

lallysingh wrote: post #320
sheepscreek wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument doesn’t make any sense. What does this have to do with supporting Arm chips? It’s not like AMD and Intel are waging a war against Valve. If anything Steam helps them by strengthening the PC gaming market, leading to higher CPU/GPU sales.

Slowly getting their stuff independent of wintel gives a lot of flexibility. And the big gaming market's on phones / tablets. A steam controller could find itself paired to an iPad running steam in a year or two.

We're too far into the grip of monopolies for that. Apple would never let a full version of Steam run on iPads. Google wouldn't either.

I think more ARM Valve hardware is likely.

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

#442

Post by chaostheory »

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"

I strongly feel it’s because Valve is not a publicly traded company where they’ll eventually give up their values to meet Wall Street analyst quarterly targets.

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

#443

Post by johnnyanmac »

quitit wrote: post #388
johnnyanmac wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really a fan of this reasoning when in the same breath: Epic is also a private company but has its share of stuff. It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.

Attributing it to private company behaviour really minimises what Valve chooses to do. Per your counter example: Epic Games has been having a very public meltdown this week regarding Steam's inclusion of Gen-AI labelling - here we have two private companies, with two very different priorities. It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking kids into mak…

I don't really get it myself. I personally don't give Steam credit for weakly saying 'hey you need to label something'. Let me know when really enforce it. Heck, let me know when they at least add a filter. That's when you can really impact the behaviour (or prove consumers really don't care).

But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of evil.

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

#444

Post by johnnyanmac »

0x1ch wrote: post #428
johnnyanmac wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. it aligns, for now. But only for now. all those FAANG's had the same status too, once upon a time.

Valve predates Google by two years (at least per the wiki), and was started by Microsoft employees who didn't particularly like Microsoft's operation. Hoping Valve has a long future ahead of them :)

Yeah, and they shifted from being a gamik studio to a middleman. The signs are already there, but greed arrives all the same.

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

#445

Post by avianlyric »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #267
dansalvato wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm): > We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported. Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdr…

Agree but I would argue RISC is catching up fast.

It’s not even close. Samsung alone ships around 400 million phones a year, that’s 400 million ARM devices a year from a single manufacturer. The number of total consumer ARM devices sold each year is in the billions.

RISC-V total total estimated market value is only around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM volumes, and even then it’ll be half a decade for RISC-V devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-use devices, given there’s many billions of ARM devices out there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.

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

#446

Post by charcircuit »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #336
charcircuit wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a fool's errand. You are underestimating how few games most of Steam user's playtime is in. Getting proper support for ARM to make out the most performance on the most popular titles is a reasonable thing to fund. Valve can still use FEX for addressing the long tail of games, but it will have disadvantages to a proper ARM port.

But is the disadvantage worth the relatively high overhead of specifically adding arm support? I doubt that. It is better game devs focus on what they're better at - x86 - while valve and open source devs focus on what they're better at, than trying to split funds across competing solutions to the problem.

The solutions have distant tradeoffs. When you want to run the latest PC games on mobile hardware using a battery, every cycle matters. Using translation layers for x86 will never be as good as as a native port.

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

#447

Post by energy123 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #327
MattDaEskimo wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest about this current situation. Valve pushing for Linux gaming is for survival, not charity. Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat) Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS

They're doing things that are simultaneously good for business and good for consumers. That contrasts against the companies doing things that are good for business (at least short term) and bad for consumers.

Sure but it's just being morally lucky. They found themself in a situation where there was temporary and situational alignment, why give them any credit for that? They didn't create that situation.

It's like AMD open sourcing FSR or Meta open sourcing Llama. The outcome itself is good, but if they ever become leaders in these verticals, they will pivot to closed source quicker than you can blink, because the reason they're doing it is just coincidental to the public good, not because of a genuine motivation to do good.

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

#448

Post by bigyabai »

N_Lens wrote: post #434
bigyabai wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's workload-dependent. On-paper, ARM is more power-efficient at idle and simple ops, but slows down dramatically when trying to translate/compose SIMD instructions.

You seem to have conflated SIMD and emulation in the context of performance. ARM has it's own SIMD instructions and doesn't take a performance hit when executing those. Translating x86 SIMD to ARM has an overhead that causes a performance hit, which is due to emulation.

Both incur a performance hit. ARM NEON isn't fully analogous to modern AVX or SSE, so even a 1:1 native port will compile down to more bytecode than x86. This issue is definitely exacerbated when translating, but inherent to any comparison of the two.

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

#449

Post by bee_rider »

sershe wrote: post #287
bee_rider wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not. No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.

Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof... Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Win…

Does Valve engage in a lot of unfair or anticompetitive behavior? If you were to apply some anti-trust enforcement what would you actually do? Split off their game studio (that makes like one game a decade) from Steam?

They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and services directly related to that shop.

Like, when people say “split up Google” or “split up Amazon” I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses, under one umbrella—Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if browsers and operating systems didn’t have a market price of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don’t see it…

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

#450

Post by aydyn »

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

Private or public, they are making stacks hand over fist. Why cant other companies learn that being good to your customers is a winning strategy?
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