https://www.semiaccurate.com/2024/0...g-on-their-snapdragon-x-elite-pro-benchmarks/
A lot of recent AAA games like Starfield, Helldivers 2, Horizon Forbidden West, or Ghost of Tsushima unconditionally requires AVX support by default ...I don't know how much AVX is actually used in games.
But I'm more concerned with DX driver support. We've seen just how hard it is with ARC.
The biggest difference here is that MS is one of, if not the biggest games publishers, and they have an inherent reason for arm to be successful compared to arc.
So I would hope they make native office apps, and native ports for all their currently supported games day one the devices launch.
Probably can only put in the store, don't know if steam supports multi-arch.
Minecraft, COD, FlightSim, SOT, Forzas, Bethesda stuff. Would be good for store but hige for the devices.
I think MS needs to at least do their part by providing native versions.A lot of recent AAA games like Starfield, Helldivers 2, Horizon Forbidden West, or Ghost of Tsushima unconditionally requires AVX support by default ...
As for drivers, Intel would be an apt example as to what to expect from QCOM since they both share fickle shader compilers and no developers and I mean *absolutely no developers* will even attempt to test their applications against their driver implementations. For game developers, if it works on the AMD/NV driver implementation then they'll simply proceed to ship their product even if it is subtly broken on other hardware vendors ...
Current Windows on ARM devices will not succeed at being able to run a good chunk of AAA games released in the last couple years or let alone any games with anti-cheat kernel drivers ...
That still leaves out every other game developer/publisher independent of Microsoft. Sony games are just one of the biggest offenders with the AVX requirement. Ubisoft, Sega, Capcom, and Square are others that have been compiling their games with AVX too. Some DRM tools also use AVX even if the game itself doesn't!I think MS needs to at least do their part by providing native versions.
Which means doing the work.
Then at least the devices will have a good selection of native software. (all things considered)
The main problem with AVX emulation is the wider register width (256-bit) and even if the Neon extension features a similar register file size (due to having 2x# regs) there are many cases where you can't do static register allocation to keep the same amount of registers between the the host (ARM) and target (x86) architecture due to the mismatched vector sizes. There are games that don't work on Intel GPUs for this very same reason since some games rely on on having their shaders specifically compiled into either wave64/32 sizes. The former is impossible to emulate without significant slowdowns and while Intel GPUs do have a SIMD32 mode, they can't promise you that their shader compiler won't pick SIMD8/SIMD16 either ...I think it's good that AVX is being used, fact it may cause issues when being emulated is just life and will either need to be worked around or just not work well.
But natively compiled versions doesn't have to use AVX. Don't know what the state of neon is, expect it to have been superseded by now but could make use of that.
Don't think PS5 has full AVX? So shows games doesn't have to be dependent on it.
I always find that MS puts things out, and tools and say there you go, but are bad at supporting it itself IMO.