Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm • Hacker News Board

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

#791

Post by quitit » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:50 PM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #443

quitit wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah we also need to get out of the dichotomous thinking that companies are either all good or all bad.

Companies will do things that represent their interests, sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things where they believe the profitability will outweigh the blowback.*

It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal one.

*The Epic example is useful because their actions represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.

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

#792

Post by nomel » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

marmarama wrote: post #231

nomel wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering, like all the other mainstream GPUs use.

Loads of GPUs with Vulkan support use TBDR. The Adreno GPU in the Steam Frame's SnapDragon SoC, for one. There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.

No. For best performance, you have to batch your calls/memory access patterns with TBDR in mind. Dropping in a Steam PC game (indy, AA/AAA) game render pipeline, specifically optimized for Nvidia/AMD/Intel, to a TBDR GPU, is going to give poor performance. That's the context of this discussion. Round pegs DO fit into square holes, you just have to make sure the hole is bigger than would normally be necessary. ;)

Steam frame is more for streaming PCVR than running existing PCVR games natively.

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

#793

Post by ethbr1 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

aydyn wrote: post #779

vjk800 wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Because there's a huge network effect in play here and Valve was first in the market.

That doesnt explain their surge in growth only in recent years, its not like gaming is new. No, its all the new features they are offering and goodwill they have engendered.

One of the characteristic of network effects is that you see growth, simply by virtue of being the first/biggest.

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

#794

Post by kelseyfrog » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:04 PM UTC

dchftcs wrote: post #592

kelseyfrog wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anisotropic mouse movement? Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data? There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.

Throwing in ML jargon and going straight to modelling before understanding the problem reduces your credibility as a data scientist in front of engineers and stakeholders. As always, one of the most difficult parts is getting good features and data. In this case one difficulty is measuring and defining the reaction time to begin with. In Counter Strike you rely on footsteps to guess if someone is around the corner an…

Appreciate the feedback, you're right - armchair speculation is different than actual data science. Without actual data to examine, we're left with the latter and that can still be a fun exercise even if it doesn't solve any business problem. We're here to chitchat and converse after all.

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

#795

Post by nomel » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:12 PM UTC

NekkoDroid wrote: post #321

nomel wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering, like all the other mainstream GPUs use.

The entire reason vulkan didn't ship with dynamic rendering and instead had its entire renderpass system is because it was to support tile based rendering.

I'm aware it supports tile based rendering. I put it in quotes because support doesn't mean performance. Good TBDR performance requires the developer/engine have the concept of TBDR in mind. 99.9% of the PC games out there do/did NOT have TBDR in mind.

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

#796

Post by goosejuice » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

lsaferite wrote: post #745

goosejuice wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> usually don't take the same heat for the business model that Valve does for loot boxes, even though they're actually worse on paper. This is a weird claim. TCG/CCG is far worse than Valve's loot boxes. It's not even close. MTG Arena is huge btw, it's not a footnote.

Their point was that WotC doesn't get the same flak that Value does when MtG is worse, by far, than cosmetic loot boxes.

Yes, I'm calling that questionable. Says who? TCGs have entire formats designed in opposition to the high cost random booster shit. I think that's pretty good evidence that there's high negative sentiment.

Valve is simply larger and took legal heat for people misusing the API.

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

#797

Post by bigyabai » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

viktorcode wrote: post #623

bigyabai wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's not very reassuring. You guys remember when you bought a computer and could run the software you wanted, independent of political motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to provide high-quality long term support only works if Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings that still…

I'm not sure what you are referring to, but I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now, and way worse working WINE. No, there was never time when we could run whatever software we want on a machine of our choice.

> I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now

Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer apps than ever support macOS as a native target. Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about it.

Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010, depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA compute drivers work but Apple refuses to sign them. The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is petty politicking.

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

#798

Post by tombert » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 8:43 PM UTC

Gormo wrote: post #764

tombert wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thos…

It’s fine to express approval for something a corporation does, but I think you are wrong when you say people don’t worship companies. The cult of Apple is very real.

I mostly meant “let’s look at this stuff with a healthy amount of cynicism”. This isn’t to say we can’t like the good things.

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

#799

Post by oersted » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

nialv7 wrote: post #688

aperture147 wrote: post #630

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…

I have been a big fan of Valve since the Orange Box days and I always dreamed of working there, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is all enabled by the massive monopolistic cash-cow that is Steam that requires a tiny team to maintain. Similarly their top games have minuscule teams and still rake-in millions in microtransactions, fueled by a shadow economy of gambling and speculative trading aimed at kids.

Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building truly outstanding products in good faith and by being pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.

My point is that Valve is not all that special for being nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they don’t have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it’s not exactly a high standard, and they are remarkably inefficient in leveraging that advantage.

They’ve long lost the organizational know-how to make good games, and they have delivered remarkably few public facing successes in the last decade: mainly Valve Index and Steam Deck, both still relatively niche and wide apart, both primarily attempts at expanding Steam’s dominance to fairly uncharted markets, with mixed success. The first iteration of Steam Machines was dead on arrival, as was their long-anticipated game Artifact. CS 2 was not a significant enough upgrade to Go to really count. Half-Life Alyx was popularish I suppose. Anything else of note?

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

#800

Post by arcfour » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #755

arcfour wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why there are no publicly-traded companies more than a decade or two old. Oh, wait...

The comment you replied to was just pointing out that, like how a founder-held company can get stuck pursuing the founder's obsession, a stock market held company can also single-mindedly pursue quarterly gains to the detriment of long-term health. There are old companies in either model.

It didn't say can. It stated it rather definitively, which I wanted to point out the absurdity of.