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.