Comment on Valve is working on a version of proton for ARM devices
soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
ARM based Deck would be a huge improvement to battery life. Don’t get your hopes up too high. You will need an emulation layer like FEX of Box64, and unlike WINE those do have quite a substantial overhead.
It is impressive how far those emulators have come, especially since they got the option to use native libraries instead of emulated ones, but the game logic itself will always need emulation…
This doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means that the ARM CPU needs to be pretty fast to counter the emulation overhead, and that’s why I have my doubts about the energy efficiency…
(Btw: I have tried running several AMD64 games on my A311D powered MNT Reform laptop with Box64. It’s impressive how well the emulation runs, and how many games are actually playable already. However, I also encountered a lot of games that don’t reach enjoyable FPS on that hardware. With a faster ARM chip though…)
tiddy@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
With a big dev like valve backing it they could probably implement a pretty impressive JIT/cacheing scheme - of course nothing beats native but this gap will close over time
soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Yep. The big question is if the gap will close enough that ARM chips indeed end up delivering better power efficiency with emulation than an AMD64 chip that delivers the same performance without emulation.
My bets would be on the native AMD64 chip ending up more power efficient. To be honest, I would not bet too much money though.