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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

#761

Post by wat10000 »

simonh wrote: post #704
bux93 wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as if public companies don't overspend on executive compensation. I think one CEO recently asked for a trillion dollar compensation package?

I'll make you a deal. You agree to give me a trillion dollars, but only if I make you 8 trillion dollars. I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.

The thing is, the compensation is only based on it happening, not on him making it happen. “I make you 8 trillion dollars” rests on a strong assumption that it all comes from the CEO.

This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.

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

#762

Post by danaris »

babypuncher wrote: post #288
philistine wrote: post #196

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…

> 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 doesn't matter if there's an inherent, fundamental flaw in the ISA, if Intel can't, for whatever reason(s), develop an x86 chip that actually beats ARM on performance per watt in a broadly-applicable way.

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

#763

Post by tombert »

Gormo wrote: post #746
tombert wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

A "company" is just an organizational model employed by people to pursue the intentions that those people have. It goes without saying that large endeavors involving many people will have a mixture of good and bad intentions. Opposing all organized endeavors simply because they have the potential to pursue bad intentions essentially resolves to being against anything anyone is ever doing, which is more than a little…

I didn’t say you would oppose all organized endeavors. I said we shouldn’t worship companies.

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

#764

Post by Gormo »

tombert wrote: post #763
Gormo wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "company" is just an organizational model employed by people to pursue the intentions that those people have. It goes without saying that large endeavors involving many people will have a mixture of good and bad intentions. Opposing all organized endeavors simply because they have the potential to pursue bad intentions essentially resolves to being against anything anyone is ever doing, which is more than a little…

I didn’t say you would oppose all organized endeavors. I said we shouldn’t worship companies.

Well, no one is literally worshiping companies, so I interpreted this as a hyperbolic way of saying that people shouldn't express approval for activities done by companies.

But companies themselves are just organizational paradigms used by people to pursue human intentions, and the reason you offered as to why we shouldn't "worship companies" was based on the possibility of people acting on bad intentions within those organizational paradigms.

But the possibility of people acting on bad intentions is present in all contexts of human activity, regardless of what organizational paradigm people are using to coordinate their activities.

So if "worship" resolves to "express approval for", and "companies" resolves to "organized human activity", based on a failure modality that's always present in all cases, then you are actually saying that people should not express approval for organized human activity.

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

#765

Post by Xss3 »

danaris wrote: post #758
Xss3 wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mustve missed the part where i spoke of consistency? Ive played at the pro level. Nobody prefires with perfect robotic consistency. I dont care if it takes 50 matches of data for the statistical model to call it inhuman. Valve has enough data that they could easily make the threshold for a ban something like '10x more consistent at pre-firing than any pro has ever been' with a high confidence borne over many enga…

> Nobody prefires with perfect robotic consistency. Then all you need to do to fool this anticheat is to add some randomness to the cheat.

Then youve immediately made the cheater worse than the best players to blend in with them. Mission accomplished, cheater nerfed significantly. You wont even know theyre doing it.

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

#766

Post by Xss3 »

dchftcs wrote: post #760
Akronymus wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cheaters play indistingushable from normal people, the seems like mission accomplished.

Cheaters don't have to play like normal people to avoid detection. They just have to make it expensive to police them. For example, the game developer may be afraid of a even a 10% false positive ban rate, and as a result won't ban anyone except perhaps a small number of clean-cut cases.

Most cheaters are playing well outside of human limits and doing huge amounts of damage to the legitimate player experience. A 10% safety margin beyond human play sounds reasonable. A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment.

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

#767

Post by DrammBA »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #624
phendrenad2 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy to say. But they do prevent some cheating. Don't believe me? Consider the simplest case: No anti-cheat whatsoever. You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw walls at 50% transparency. That's the worst case. Now, we add minimal anti-cheat that convolutes the binary with lots of extra jumps and loops at runtime. Now, someone needs to spend time figuring out the pattern. That effort isn't free. No…

> You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw walls at 50% transparency A properly designed game should not send the position of ennemies out of view

What do you do with footsteps and other positional audio? On multiplayer shooter games that's very vital information to let you know an enemy is somewhere behind a wall but cheaters can use it to draw visual markers to pinpoint the enemy player.

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

#768

Post by MayeulC »

orthoxerox wrote: post #585
rincebrain wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if they moved to ARM any time soon, because even if the CPUs can punch that hard, they're definitely not competing on the GPU front, from what I understand of the state of the art outside of Apple, so they're gonna wind up with a dGPU anyway if they did. Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Dec…

Does ARM support PCIe, by the way? Or has no one combined ARM with a dGPU because it's ridiculous to combine a low-voltage CPU with a space heater from Nvidia?

The PCI bus has nothing to do with the instruction set. Usually it is just a block a designer can add to a chip, and connect to an internal bus like AXI, give or take a few other adjustments on the chip. You can have PCIe buses without proper CPUs, even: it's quite common to find them paired with FPGAs.

For instance, Rasberry Pis have had a PCI bus for a few generations now, at first used for USB3. The Pi 5 breaks it out on a dedicated connector, making it easy to plug external devices: https://raspberrytips.com/pcie-raspberry-pi5/ (random link).

Of course, discrete GPUs are less ideal from a power efficiency perspective (duplicated memory controller, buses, and power circuits), so they wouldn't fit the Steam Deck. But write a big enough check, and I'm sure that AMD or Intel would be willing to share their iGPU designs. NVidia also makes Tegras.

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

#769

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

It's because Valve is privately owned. No shareholder value to maximize.

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

#770

Post by fulafel »

IshKebab wrote: post #677
fulafel wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they were targeting Android, and the apps were emulating ARM on x86, and they were going against a strong incumbent. Accounts on the web of this failure seem to bring up other failings as the main problems.

> the apps were emulating ARM on x86 They weren't (except some games maybe). Most apps were written in Java and JITed.

Well, apps tuned for performance and apps using native code have more than a little overlap. Even back then there were a lot of apps besides games that used native code for the hot code paths. But games of course are huge by themselves, and besides performance you need to have good power efficiency in running them.

Here's some more details: https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/02/arm_test_results_atta...

(note it's a 2-part, the "next page" link is small print )

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