Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
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Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#2How hard would it be for Blizzard to just recompile WoW to support arm64?
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#3How hard would it be for Blizzard to just recompile WoW to support arm64?
They support arm64
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#4How hard would it be for Blizzard to just recompile WoW to support arm64?
They did, and that's what this article is benchmarking.
Specifically, it's comparing the native ARM64 version against the emulated x86_64 version, both running on an ARM64 CPU.
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#5How hard would it be for Blizzard to just recompile WoW to support arm64?
It seems that "native vs. emulated" here means "arm64 binaries vs. x86 binaries, both running on Windows". So the comparison that the OP is making wouldn't be possible if Blizzard didn't already support aarch64.
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#6How hard would it be for Blizzard to just recompile WoW to support arm64?
As others have said in this thread, they did.
But to answer your question as if they had not yet: it's never "just" recompiling. It's:
* recompile (and fix any warnings/errors indicated by the compiler)
* re-test ... the entire game
* fix the bugs that are encountered in test
* release/publish the game for Windows ARM64
Whatever this effort is, it's much much more than "just" recompiling. You could imagine motivated individuals on the engineering team chipping away at this list of their own accord. But following through with a product requires significant effort and coordination that often is weighed against the potential revenue that this new market could provide.
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#7Interesting, 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 too.
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#8It offers native x86, Windows on ARM, and Apple Silicon versions.
I think this is incorrect. Specifically the Windows ARM support. Official hardware support page indicates that the Windows version requires x64. I unfortunately don’t have the hardware to confirm for myself. But Blizzard is the kind of company that would have made a blog post about that.
https://us.support.blizzard.com/en/article/76459
This is neat, and exciting that Windows emulation tooling is progressing! It seems like there’s a lot of work hardware vendors would need to do in order to make Win/Arm viable for game devs. I really wonder if that’s ever going to happen.
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#9How hard would it be for Blizzard to just recompile WoW to support arm64?
As others have said in this thread, they did. But to answer your question as if they had not yet: it's never "just" recompiling. It's: * recompile (and fix any warnings/errors indicated by the compiler) * re-test ... the entire game * fix the bugs that are encountered in test * release/publish the game for Windows ARM64 Whatever this effort is, it's much much more than "just" recompiling. You could imagine motivated…
> * 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.
Re: Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
#10It offers native x86, Windows on ARM, and Apple Silicon versions. I think this is incorrect. Specifically the Windows ARM support. Official hardware support page indicates that the Windows version requires x64. I unfortunately don’t have the hardware to confirm for myself. But Blizzard is the kind of company that would have made a blog post about that. https://us.support.blizzard.com/en/article/76459 This is neat, an…
Windows ARM builds are available on their CDN.