Iintl t1_j5ij2eb wrote on January 23, 2023 at 6:10 AM

Reply to comment by Xanthis in Radxa Rock5 Model A is a credit card-sized single-board PC with RK3588S and up to 16GB RAM (starting at $99) by giuliomagnifico

The Apple M1 proved that ARM cores can outpace x86 in terms of performance. Not sure why you’d think ARM chips are inherently weaker or less capable of gaming than x86

Xanthis t1_j5ip72l wrote on January 23, 2023 at 7:24 AM

The apple M1 is a VERY different beast from the ARM device here. It has a significantly increased number of instruction sets supported, as well as is capable of x86 and amd64 emulation. While you can absolutely run windows 10arm on one of these, you will be significantly limited to what software is designed for ARM.

We deal with the surface Pro X a lot at work, and getting something as simple as a printer driver to work consistently a ROYAL PITA. And those are devices that DO have x86 and AMD64 (Win11) emulation built right in. Running something like as complex physics engine is a total different ballgame. While it most definitely can be done, it requires the cpu to do a huge amount more work because it has to emulate a different architecture since most physics engines don't support ARM in the slightest.

I'm not saying its not possible with any ARM chip, I'm just saying its extremely unlikely with that one. Even if you could get it to run without crashing (good luck, skyrim is crashy on a good day), you would be looking at a sideshow.

Iintl t1_j5isg6w wrote on January 23, 2023 at 8:06 AM

There are already many games that run well on Windows 11 VM on M1/M2 (Parallels Desktop). For example the Witcher 3, and funnily enough, Skyrim (1080p medium runs at 60fps reportedly). So that's just not true. In any case, performance issues is not a result of the ARM architecture pre se, but rather the fact that PC games are designed with x86 in mind only. If Skyrim were to be converted to Unreal Engine or Unity, for example, it would run very well on ARM devices.

Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about it, but the Switch literally has Skyrim available. And the Switch is an ARM-based chip with a “mobile” CPU/GPU, with 2015-grade performance. Modern mobile processors like the Apple A16 or Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 easily offer 2~3x the CPU/GPU performance

Emu1981 t1_j5kgy89 wrote on January 23, 2023 at 5:28 PM

>Switch literally has Skyrim available.

Skyrim is not a good example for this though. Skyrim had it's ten year anniversary 2 years ago. This means that the "2015-grade performance" is actually 2 generations ahead of what was available when Skyrim released.

barjam t1_j5jbwsr wrote on January 23, 2023 at 12:25 PM

Skyrim already runs fine on low end arm devices (Nintendo switch).

The switch at this point is basically the same as an entry level cell phone.

Emu1981 t1_j5kgg4k wrote on January 23, 2023 at 5:25 PM

>The Apple M1 proved that ARM cores can outpace x86 in terms of performance.

And a lot of the performance wins are due to the ASICs on the SoC instead of actual core performance. ASICs will always outperform general purpose processors because they are specially designed to do a certain task well instead of doing everything ok.