Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

rkblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#41

Post by sumtechguy »

jsiepkes wrote: post #30
saubeidl wrote: post #29

I wish ARM wasn't so messy for Linux, with out of date device trees etc. All I want is something like a Macbook Air, but running Linux - long battery life, acceptable performance, an OS that respects me.

This is also why I don't get why people are so enthusiastic about ARM. While there is nothing technically preventing manufacturers from using extensible standards and technologies like ACPI, UEFI, etc. with ARM, pretty much no one does. Meaning these devices are closed and pretty unusable with Linux.

ARM does not have a 'ibm pc clone' moment. There is no one, that anyone wants to rally behind. The market is fragmented in an interesting way but a way that is hard for people to target. This fragmentation has existed since the start of microprocessor was started. There were hundreds of different x86, 6502, SH, MIPS, ARM style computers as well. Even the 'ibm pc' was even one of them, but everyone just kinda said 'that one'. All of those standards you said exist in some ARM boards. It is a really mixed bag. Out of all of the ARM systems RasberryPI came closest to a standard.

QCOM in this case probably could make a standard ARM PC. The problem will be QCOM corporate structure will probably strangle it. They will want to create a patent license stream. The interesting bits would be behind NDAs. It is their bread and butter.

The reality is no one wants to be IBM in the IBM/PC clone market. Basically the ones who did the expensive work to make the board but everyone just copies it.

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#42

Post by kcb »

jeroenhd wrote: post #34
jsiepkes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also why I don't get why people are so enthusiastic about ARM. While there is nothing technically preventing manufacturers from using extensible standards and technologies like ACPI, UEFI, etc. with ARM, pretty much no one does. Meaning these devices are closed and pretty unusable with Linux.

ARM support is still mediocre, but it's improving with the new Snapdragons. Every generation seems to make running normal Linux on those things a little bit less of a pain. Funnily enough, the device with probably the best "normal" desktop protocol support is the old Windows RT tablet, which features an ARM SoC that runs UEFI and ACPI and everything. It's locked down to Microsoft's secure boot keys, unfortunately, bu…

The Thinkpad x13s is pretty good for a mostly normal arm Linux laptop. The SOC is still pretty usable and it's functionality on Linux is also pretty complete. The main thing lacking is the speakers are very low to protect them from blowing out without a proper driver.

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#43

Post by brianwawok »

wkat4242 wrote: post #35
jsiepkes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also why I don't get why people are so enthusiastic about ARM. While there is nothing technically preventing manufacturers from using extensible standards and technologies like ACPI, UEFI, etc. with ARM, pretty much no one does. Meaning these devices are closed and pretty unusable with Linux.

Linux had the chance to fight against what GNU called "TiVoisation" but Linus said TiVo did nothing wrong. So now we have a world full of devices running open software but which are locked down. And a Linux foundation run by corporates. To me it is clear this was indeed a huge problem. Linux might not have become as big as it is now if it had taken GPL3 on board but it would have made it a lot harder for manufacturer…

So they took gpl3, and manufactures all licensed windows. Does this help Linux or FOSS?

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#44

Post by cykros »

eptcyka wrote: post #19
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #7

Interesting, I didn't know they'd added an Windows/ARM build. Makes some sense though, WoW has always been one of the best about broad platform/arch support… macOS/PPC and Windows/x86 versions were both available from day one and have stayed in lockstep the whole time, and it was among the first games to make both the PPC → x86 jump and x86 → ARM jump on Macs. Have heard that they had Linux builds internally early on…

Wine has almost always worked, back when I played.

I recall seeing that it ran better on wine than on windows on the same hardware.

Never tested myself as I'm more a runescape/ragnarok online sorta guy myself...

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#45

Post by jajuuka »

I've been very curious about this since they added Windows on ARM support. Admittedly there hasn't been a really performant SoC to see how it stacks up to Apple Silicon. The Apple Silicon version runs so well I had hoped they brought that same performance jump to Windows on ARM. One thing I noticed about the Apple Silicon version was that it loads the game world significantly faster than x86. Even with lots of heavy addons. I'm curious if that mirrors to Windows ARM.

Also curious if Battle.net client has the same bug as Apple Silicon where it consistently needs to run a game "update" after closing the game. The client is still x86 even on macOS so I'm wondering if this is an translation issue that could be fixed with a proper native client.

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#46

Post by jajuuka »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #24

I'm somewhat surprised that WoW runs on high settings on iGPUs these days.

How well it runs scales with how new the content is. They illustrated this in the article, but they didn't test the current expansion content and high traffic areas. I imagine main hubs like Dornogal or the current raid tier will require dropping the graphics very low to not have a slide show. Bumping up the resolution has a significant impact as well.

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#47

Post by jajuuka »

mort96 wrote: post #28
pdpi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've supported macOS through all of PowerPC, Intel, and now ARM. I'm sure Windows on ARM should be trivial for them.

They did the work your parent comment describes for macOS on PowerPC, macOS on Intel, and macOS on arm. They can do the work, but it's still work.

I think it also depends on urgency. When Apple unveiled Intel and Apple Silicon they were very clearly the future of the platforms with large buy in from day 1. Blizzard seems to have a good relationship with Apple since they released the Apple Silicon version of WoW almost the day the first laptops started shipping to customers.

Windows on ARM isn't really the same ballpark. They were still there early, but the platform is still changing quite a bit.

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#48

Post by CursedSilicon »

eptcyka wrote: post #19
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #7

Interesting, I didn't know they'd added an Windows/ARM build. Makes some sense though, WoW has always been one of the best about broad platform/arch support… macOS/PPC and Windows/x86 versions were both available from day one and have stayed in lockstep the whole time, and it was among the first games to make both the PPC → x86 jump and x86 → ARM jump on Macs. Have heard that they had Linux builds internally early on…

Wine has almost always worked, back when I played.

There was a native Linux client available when the game was still in alpha. Circa 2002/2003

Blizzard leans heavily on making sure their software is portable!

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#49

Post by rkpiotr »

jajuuka wrote: post #46
KeplerBoy wrote: post #24

I'm somewhat surprised that WoW runs on high settings on iGPUs these days.

How well it runs scales with how new the content is. They illustrated this in the article, but they didn't test the current expansion content and high traffic areas. I imagine main hubs like Dornogal or the current raid tier will require dropping the graphics very low to not have a slide show. Bumping up the resolution has a significant impact as well.

With player hubs, it's always a stutter, but it also depends on the network connection - you can have someone with the best rig showing 10 FPS and someone on a laptop with 30-40 FPS at the same time.

Mass mobs combat in Karazhan is a pretty good raid tester - in raids, the FPS won't be as low as that (AVG), but the 1%/0.1% lows will be quite close. For systems with weaker and weaker CPUs, even the AVG FPS will come closer and closer as the game will get a single-core "world state" bottleneck more easily. I did some comparison benchmarks before for this, including a world boss world quest with lots of people ;)

Also, regressions in WoW are a nightmare to handle. You go to the latest raid, the FPS is fine, but someone next to you has a slideshow.

Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

#50

Post by MangoToupe »

kergonath wrote: post #36
MangoToupe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * re-test ... the entire game That seems a bit absurd. Surely many parts of the game won't likely have bits of code that interact with architecture in unique ways. Especially if you wrote the game in relatively portable code to begin with (as WoW almost certainly was). I mean idk, maybe windows arm64 is a uniquely nasty target. But i'm skeptical.

> Surely many parts of the game won't likely have bits of code that interact with architecture in unique ways. I came across a performance-killing bug that made the game unplayable (less than 1fps on a Mac Studio). It happened in a couple of dungeons (I spotted 2). From my tests it was caused by a specific texture in the field of view at a certain distance. There was no problem on Intel Macs, AFAICT. My old MBP was t…

> From my tests it was caused by a specific texture in the field of view at a certain distance.

Surely that's a GPU thing and not an CPU thing, yea? Or was something about the texture processing architecture-dependent?

Post reply on HN