this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Linux Gaming

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FEX-Emu 2308 Continues Striving To Be "The Greatest x86/x86-64 Emulator On Linux" (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/linux_gaming
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hopefully valve dedicates resources to this so a future Steamdeck can be ARM based so it’s much cooler and doesn’t need a fan as much

[–] Secret300 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd love to see a RISC-V chip used one day

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah that would be great! although I'm not sure of any current work being done to emulate x64 games on RISC-V yet

[–] Secret300 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think box64 works for RISC-V as well but I'd have to go double check

Edit: box64 and RISC-V shows stardew valley working. Didn't really read it

https://box86.org/2023/05/box64-and-risc-v/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sweet!

[–] just_another_person -3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It could be Arm64, but the games aren't. Not many devs or studios are compiling for both x86 and Arm, so unless you want to emulate the instructions, x86 is the preferred platform.

[–] just_another_person 4 points 1 year ago

I'll reply to my own comment since so many people decided to give me shit and not understand what I was saying:

  • Valve is primarily a software distribution company, not a hardware company
  • they went with x86 because it makes sense since not many studios are distributing arm64 compiled versions of games
  • Distributing multiple versions of games in different architectures is HARD
  • instruction emulation is SLOW
  • there is no reason why Valve would go with a custom Arm hardware platform when literally 99% of all gamers are running x86
  • running an emulation layer to translate removes all power savings benefit for the most part, especially since in gaming it's almost all GPU instruction taking the brunt of the power draw
  • shipping multiple architectures on Steam is equally HARD, as you're not just debugging one architecture, you're debugging multiple, and then variants of Arm versions.

x86 makes sense, and will into the near future.

[–] ryapric 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just making sure you know that you are indeed commenting on a post about an x86 emulator.

[–] just_another_person 1 points 1 year ago

He's talking about Valve making a decision to stick with x86 hardware, which I reinforced. What am I missing here?