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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

#731

I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it’s even possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as more games get optimized.

How did you do that?

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

#732
post #432
post #18

kinda funny that Microsoft has tried and failed multiple times to make Windows on ARM work and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's detriment

It's mostly because Microsoft have lost focus & interest in the desktop OS market and have shifted priorities to cloud service (Azure). Right now Microsoft is a sleeping giant that doesn't see the writing on the wall regarding Valve's efforts.

Oh I think they see it, the problem is that they can’t execute anymore. They are pivoting in the same direction but nobody wants to use the XBox Store on Windows and nobody trusts Game Pass anymore.

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

#733
post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk, Bosch or Patagonia. LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently." The key, if I…

One of the issues with founders is that they get really into one specific idea and sink the company, rather then to switch strategy.

As opposed to shareholders, who ravenously seek to maximize short term profits and sink the company.

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

#734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is only one of many factors, but I know that high performance instruction decoding doesn't scale nearly as well on x86-64 due to the variable width instructions as it does on ARM. Any reasonable performance OoO core needs to read multilpe instructions ahead in order for t…

> x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions

Intel Lion-cove decodes 8 instructions per cycle and can retire 12. Intel Skymont's triple decoder can even do 9 instructions per cycle and that's without a cache.

AMD's Zen 5 on the other hand has a 6K cache for instruction decoding allowing for 8 instructions per cycle, but still only a 4-wide decoder for each hyper-thread.

And yet AMD is still ahead of intel in both performance and performance-per-watt. So maybe this whole instruction decode thing is not as important as people are saying.

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there should perhaps be a law that any corporation automatically has a new class of un-tradeable VOTING shares, worth 50% of the overall vote, held by the employees. Everybody with an employment contract with this company is entitled to 1 vote, no more, no less; whether they're the janitor or the CEO. Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that…

A law like this just means getting full time employment becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of people working for a company will be non-voting contractors without benefits. The existing employees would even vote for changes that make full time hiring more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own votes.

It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous enforcement of employee classification. I know there would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't want to make my comment too long.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.

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

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and…

You can at least in part blame Milton Friedman for this mess. His reframing of ficudiary duty as profit maximisation in his "shareholder theory" has done a tremendous amount of damage. The wariness of people when it comes to public companies is a direct consequence of this.

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

#737

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.

> Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.

Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.

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

#738
post #516
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wealthiest 10% of Americans own like 90% of stocks, and the top 1% own 50%. While the poorest 50% of the population own about 1% of the stock market. So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be confusing because it can also mean state control) just means it's open for the elite to invest in.

It's amazing to me how many people don't get this.

Well, considering that it doesn't seem to be an accurate statement, it shouldn't be so amazing that people don't "get" it.

By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.

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

#739
post #688

I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-w…

I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that each individual acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone. And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capi…

Many of steams consumer benefits were a direct result of Valve getting sued and losing court cases. For example refunds and forced arbitration clause.

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

#740
post #737

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.

> Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.

So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
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