2001zhaozhao 5 hours ago

I think this is the first time an ARM windows device gets marketed for gaming. Would be interesting to see what kind of performance hit games have on the x86 to ARM translation layer.

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fidotron 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Rosetta on Mac was obviously impressive. There was also impressive Arm->Intel translation in the mobile ecosystem at one time.

One reason it works surprisingly well on modern systems is how much is offloaded to the GPU. You aren't going to get great power optimization or anything without it being truly native though.

There are games which are CPU limited though, and it will be interesting how those do. Curiously those also tend to be in engines with Arm support already.

	▲	HerbManic an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There was a presentation from Valve about their Dex compatibility layer. They did something that seems so obvious in retrospect. When you lay out the software stack it is essentially OS > Game code > APIs. Both the OS and APIs are native code, it is only that middle point that needs the real work. This is why x86 to ARM doesn't have such a heavy performance cost. So games can be CPU heavy but if it is heavy at the API end, that isnt a huge issue. Very cool.

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lowbloodsugar 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Apple Silicon has a special mode that modified how the ARM chip handles memory transactions to be like x86. Does this nvidia ARM have the same?

What would be interesting to me would be how quickly developers start targeting ARM64 directly.

	▲	odkurzacz 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For Apple use of Rosetta 2 was only temporary as they moved whole lineup to ARM. MS would not abandon x64 anytime soon. So I'm guessing they will try hard to convince developers to release for both architectures.