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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

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely more than just private ownership. In fact I’d say that’s the least part of it. Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.

If you want to be specific that general idea could be elaborated as "private ownership by people that only need the C-suite salary, instead of needing a C-suite plus a fat % RoI on the company's entire valuation because that's how much they just put down as a sunk cost." In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling ou…

Furthermore, PE ownership generally means (a) achieving ROI as quickly as possible (including by dismantling the company and/or mortgaging its assets), (b) installing leadership who has no ties to the business, and (c) cutting costs to the bone.

It's not just functionally equivalent to an IPO... it's an IPO if all the buying new shareholders were sociopaths.

(Yes, there are the PE companies who run businesses better like Berkshire, but that's far from the most common type of PE)

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

#462
post #110

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.

This isn't an "issue" so much as a feature. Apple had some vulkan support until move to the full A1 architecture had them only make Metal a first class citizen to the GPU. Concurrently happening was a pretty nasty breakup of Apple with the Khronos group.

This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a deliberated decision.

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

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never. Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux…

Yes but the Proton team needs to do work for basically each game to iron out the quirks, no?

https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

Of the top 1000 games it seems 77% are playable. 40% of it needing "some tinkering" but I dont know what that means

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

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The nex…

My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption. We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores. Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the St…

> My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.

It's a distinction without a difference. x86 is not currently competitive in anything smaller than a laptop. Even in a laptop, the only reason it hasn't eaten the market is Microsoft is uninterested and Apple doesn't tell the Joker where it gets its wonderful toys.

Market forces are at play here, exactly like they were in the 90s with Intel's massive gains. ARM is making money hand over fist while x86 is getting squeezed. There will come a time where it won't make economic sense to invest in x86, technical merits be damned.

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

#465
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel spent years trying to get manufacturers to use their x86 chips in phones, but manufacturers turned them down, because the power efficiency was never good enough.

You're basically reiterating exactly what I just said. Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd have made more money selling their fab space for Cortex designs at that point. Yes, it cost Intel their smartphone contracts, but those weren't high-margin sales in the first place. Conversely, ARM's capricious licensing meant that we wouldn't see truly high-performance ARM cores until M1 and Neoverse hit the ma…

> Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd have made more money selling their fab space for Cortex designs at that point.

Maybe, but the fact remains that they spent years trying to make an Atom that could fit the performance/watt that smartphone makers needed to be competitive, and they couldn't do it, which pretty strongly suggests it's fundamentally difficult. Even if they now try to sour-grapes that they just weren't really trying, I don't believe them.

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

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The nex…

I sure hope it takes a bit longer than that. It would not be fun having only Qualcomm chips to choose from as a CPU. Either that or Intel/AMD start making their own ARM chips

There are rumours Intel might be the fab for the base M7 chip from Apple. That's the future.

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why would they care? Not even Microsoft really cares about Windows licensing for consumers and businesses are never going to use computers running fake Windows. There is no real business case.

Here’s an idea, charge money for it? I’m sure there are lots of businesses that dislike Microsoft and the freemium model they’re using.

[deleted]

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

#468
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.

Maybe they'll secretely fund an open source project to emulate only the windows kernel calls that Anti Cheats use.

As a former cheat developer, I think it is impossible since it is digging into some specific stuff of Windows. For example, some anti-cheat uses PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine and PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine to strip process handle permission, and those thing can't be well emulated, there is simply nothing in the Linux kernel nor in the Wine server to facilitate those yet. What about having a database of games and anticheat that does that, and what if the anticheat also have a whitelist for some apps to "inject" itself into the game process? Those are also needed to be handled and dealt with.

Plus, there are some really simple side channel exploits that your whitelisted app have vulns that you can grab a full-access handle to your anticheat protected game, rendering those kernel level protection useless, despite it also means external cheat and not full blown internal cheat, since interal cheat carrys way more risk, but also way more rewardings, such as fine-level game modification, or even that some 0days are found on the game network stack so maybe there is a buffer overflow or double-free, making sending malicious payload to other players and doing RCEs possible. (It is still possible to do internal cheat injection from external cheat, using techniques such as manual mapping/reflective DLL injecction, that effectively replicates PE loading mechanism, and then you hijack some execution routine at some point to call your injected-allocated code, either through creating a new thread, hijacking existing thread context, APC callback hijack or even exception vector register hijacking, and in general, hijack any kinds of control flow, but anticheat software actively look for those "illegal" stuff in memory and triggers red flag and bans you immediately)

From what I've seen over the years, the biggest problem for anticheat in Linux is that there is too much liberty and freedom, but the anticheat/antivirus is an antithesis to liberty and freedom. This is because anticheat wants to use strong protection mechanism borrowed from antivirus technique to provide a fair gaming experience, at the cost of lowering framerates and increasing processing power, and sometimes BSOD.

And I know it is very cliche at this point, but I always love to quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". I therefore only keep Windows to play games lately, and switched to a new laptop, installed CachyOS on it, and transfered all my development stuff over to the laptop. You can basically say I have my main PC at home as a more "free" xbox.

Speaking of xbox, they have even more strict control over the games, that one of the anticheat technique, HVCI (hypervisor-protected code integrity) or VBS, is straight out of the tech from xbox, that it uses Hyper-V to isolate game process and main OS, making xbox impossible to jailbreak. In Windows it prevents some degree of DMA attack by leveragng IOMMU and encrypting the memory content beforehand to makd sure it is not visible to external devices over the PCIe bus.

That said, in other words, it is ultimately all about the tradeoff between freedom and control.

A similar concept, trusted computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing

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

#469
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract. We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be t…

That's not unique to AI though. That's very common for tech startups. If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it works.

[Slaps roof of barge]

You can fit zo many tulips in this bad boy

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

#470
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract. We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be t…

That's not unique to AI though. That's very common for tech startups. If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it works.

What doesn't work are the predictions of Uber's collapse, of which there were many, cheered on by a great deal who still gather here looking for the next things to see through.
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