Is it time to recognize ARM64+Windows as a platform?

[SSG]

Many games already support ARM architecture on Windows: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Windows_ARM_games

Steam already supports ARM64 on MacOS.

I think Steam would benefit from having a native ARM64 Windows build as it currently only runs emulated. More ARM64 devices will appear on PC ecosystem in upcoming years.

You don't even need to "port" the code if you don't want. Whole code can be made ARM64-native by simply compiling it with ARM64EC option enabled: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/28/announcing-arm64ec-building-native-and-interoperable-apps-for-windows-11-on-arm/

ARM64 CPU's on PC aren't known for their power currently, but they're getting better, and not all games require immense power either.

What do you folks think?

[Satoru]

What’s the point

Steam games are x86 and thus don’t run on ARM

By the time MS gets ARM working they will absolutely positively make it a walled garden making Steam unusable anyway. And yes Ms will absolutely do that because that was the entire plan with windows 8 metro and why steam divested into Linux

Why support a platform that will be designed to make your product obsolete by design

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Satoru:

What’s the point

Steam games are x86 and thus don’t run on ARM

By the time MS gets ARM working they will absolutely positively make it a walled garden making Steam unusable anyway. And yes Ms will absolutely do that because that was the entire plan with windows 8 metro and why steam divested into Linux

Why support a platform that will be designed to make your product obsolete by design

Windows 11 on ARM supports emulation to run x86 and x64 apps on those systems. All Valve would need to do is issue ARM64 builds of their WebHelper and Steam API modules, and ARM64X (dual ARM64/ARM64EC ABI) versions of their 64-bit shared files to support x64, ARM64, and ARM64EC apps.

For such support I would recommend to Valve developers to support Windows 11 at a minimum because both the x64 emulation and the ARM64EC ABIs weren't yet available in 10.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Windows 11 on ARM supports emulation to run x86 and x64 apps on those systems.

And note that this emulation is at best 'pretty bad' for games

What would be the point of having a client that runs and then you load a game and teh thing basically runs like utter trash

And again lest we forget, yet again, windows 8 was designed to be a walled garden. and you can bet your behind MS is going to make any ARM based system a walled garden.

Note that chromebook based laptops running steam are only on x86 achitecture and thus are not ARM based either.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Satoru:

And again lest we forget, yet again, windows 8 was designed to be a walled garden. and you can bet your behind MS is going to make any ARM based system a walled garden.

I was describing how Windows 11 broke down the whole "walled garden" experience and went out of their way to support running x86 apps, even those not approved my Microsoft.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Originally posted by Satoru:

And again lest we forget, yet again, windows 8 was designed to be a walled garden. and you can bet your behind MS is going to make any ARM based system a walled garden.

I was describing how Windows 11 broke down the whole "walled garden" experience and went out of their way to support running x86 apps, even those not approved my Microsoft.

And I am going to reiterate that if we forget what history has told us, we are doomed to be shocked when history repeats itself. MS is not doing this out of the 'kindness' of its heart. Its doing so as a transitionary measure. If the transition is successful, then *surpise* the walled garden pops up behind you. If it fails, well its back to x86 then.

Its amazing that people do not think Apple or MS are looking at WIndows/Mac and thinking "this would be a million times better for 'US' if this was like iOS". They know the benefits, to themselves, of a walled garden. They absolutely positively want it. Its already happening. Wait you want Nvidia drivers? Yep go to the MS Store only now. There will be more and more of that. If you wanna take the bait and let them lure you into ARM thinking "oh yeah this is totally gonna be fine" well you're free to do so. But in a few years after you are suckerd in and then the walled garden has snuck up behind you, desipte all the signs and history of them wanting to do so, for years, well you know don't say I dind't tell you so.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

To be honest, I say no for now, as most people isn't gonna jump ship to arm.

Think for a moment, ~99% of current games are focused around x86 & x64, now imagine you broke all that, or made it really bad experience for emulation with glitch problems, bad performance, and so on, would you honestly say that good thing? Or let alone are we even ready?

If answer no, then already know why ARM isn't recognize as the replacement, nor worth recognizing for PC gaming due to amount of problems such as how long the platform been going, how poorly translation from one to the other isn't as great, and so on.

If answer yes, just go back to playing your android games on your phone...

[aiusepsi]

Originally posted by Crashed:

ARM64X (dual ARM64/ARM64EC ABI)

Oh, sweet, Microsoft kinda has their own version of universal binaries now? They're learning!

The following is not a reply to the above quote:

At the very least, it seems like a good idea to me for Valve to put out an ARM64X version of steamclient.dll and steam_api.dll, and expand the existing CPU architecture settings for things like content depots to include arm64 as well as x86 and x64. That way, at least Valve isn't getting in the way of game developers shipping Windows arm64 builds of their games if they choose to. They do ARM64 builds of those libraries for macOS, so, there's no insurmountable technical hurdle there.

And on another topic: The idea that supporting ARM is an inevitable precursor to forcing us all into a "walled garden" is very, very silly. On like, multiple levels. Assume that Microsoft wants to force us into a walled garden: what's stopping them from doing that right now? For example, UEFI on x86 systems has a secure boot system which only recognises binaries signed by Microsoft:

"Most x86 hardware comes from the factory pre-loaded with Microsoft keys. This means we can generally rely on the firmware on these systems to trust binaries that are signed by Microsoft, and the Linux community heavily relies on this assumption for Secure Boot to work."
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot

I mean, you could say that if Microsoft ever did make it so that Windows only worked with Secure Boot and stopped signing Linux bootloaders, we'd just not upgrade to the version of Windows that enforced that, and start buying motherboards which come preloaded with keys from Canonical or Red Hat rather than Microsoft. Well, yeah, and the exact same thing applies to ARM systems too!

There's no technical reason at all that they couldn't choose to lock down x86_64 systems just as hard as say, iOS is. Existence proof: the last two generations of Xbox and Playstation, which are walled gardens and use x86_64 processors. x86_64 doesn't actually confer any technical freedom.

The idea that Apple wants to lock down Mac to make it like iOS is also silly because, like, iOS & iPadOS *already exist*. Sure, they could burn the Mac down to make it just like an iPad, but like, it would be significantly easier and cheaper to just stop making Macs if that's what they wanted.

If the hypothesis that they want to use switching to ARM to lock things down was true, you'd think the first thing they'd do on this new class of Mac would make it so the bootloader on Mac was only capable of booting macOS, but like... it isn't. It explicitly has support for booting third-party OSes. The Asahi Linux guys have good docs[github.com] on it. It includes fun bits like: "This puts them somewhere between x86 PCs and a libre-first system like the Talos II in terms of freedom to replace firmware and boot components", "Apple gives users explicit permission to run their own OS in their EULA", " it seems Apple added this feature in 12.1 in order to make life easier for us"

As someone whose first used computer was an ARM-powered Acorn Archimedes in about 1991, the idea that ARM is a harbinger of the beginning of the end of general-purpose computing is just very, very funny.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by aiusepsi:

Originally posted by Crashed:

ARM64X (dual ARM64/ARM64EC ABI)

Oh, sweet, Microsoft kinda has their own version of universal binaries now? They're learning!

The following is not a reply to the above quote:

It was done by necessity, as the first generation ARM64 ABI shipped in Windows 10 could not link to x64, and they added the ARM64EC ABI and the ARM64X universal binary to avoid having to ship a whole new WOW subsystem like they do for x86 and ARM32.

[肥皂泡]

I couldn't agree more with this, in fact I own a windows device with a Qualcomm 850 processor, I can run steam and games through the translation and have shown good performance (40+fps) in some some games that are not intensive to work on, but as you said, the x64 steam client is slowing down my device's running speed, if valve builds a steam client for windows arm, then I think it would benefit the steam client experience as well as improve game performance (since steam consumes cpu performance in the background even while the game is running)

[76561199181522831]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.