News Steam comes to RISC-V thanks to emulation — AAA titles like The Witcher 3 and Crysis already playable

[Admin]

Linux developers have managed to get Steam games running on RISC-V-powered platforms using a refined x86 emulator.

Steam comes to RISC-V thanks to emulation — AAA titles like The Witcher 3 and Crysis already playable : Read more

 

[watzupken]

Playable versus being able to play games smoothly is different. Having said that, I think it is a step in the right direction. X86 have proven to be inefficient over the years as ARM and RISCV chips becomes more capable.

 

[MobileJAD]

Whenever I hear discussion about "We were able to play AAA games on ARM or RISC hardware!" I think okay, first step is to emulate the x86 software under the respected ARM or RISC architecture, which isnt a big deal, there is plenty of 8 core or more ARM and RISC processors that can get quite speedy in the MHz and GHz area. Next is how much RAM did the test system have? Are we doing this using generic SBC and dev kits you can buy off of Amazon? If we stick to the Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 boards we have something standard to test off of, or like the article mentioned people prefer playing games using the latest Apple ARM systems using their quite powerful processor. But aside from the limited amount of RAM a lot of these ARM and RISC SBC's tend to have... what on earth is the point of boasting about being able to run modern PC AAA game titles on most of these ARM and RISC systems with their comparatively low end GPU's that are built into these tiny and low energy processors? Even the strongest Apple ARM based processor doesn't compare to what most people use for gaming on PC's when it comes to GPU power. But okay, lots of ARM and RISC SBC and dev kits also come with PCIe slots, so are we somehow able to get a Nvidia RTX card or a AMD Radeon card running under RISC with Linux? Using what drivers? Sure its progress in the right direction to be able to launch games under a RISC based environment, but there is A Lot of technical work involved just to get this to happen. In the end, I personally would just build am affordable Ryzen based PC with your preffered Radeon or RTX card and throw your favorite flavor of Linux on it, install the Steam for Linux client and play some games using Steam Proton instead.

 

[ekio]

Great, it’s joining box64 in the team of x86 to riscv emulators/wrappers.
The more projects and engineers competing on the matter, the more advanced and performant they will get for users, that’s a good news.
And soon, we can ditch this x86 crap for good.