That’s not exactly an honest headline, Larian already made an ARM build of this game to run natively on Apple silicon.
According to the post, they were running the x64 version via emulation on ARM. Not a native ARM version. That’s a lot more impressive to me.
That’s fair enough, but the article is wrong in other places.
The game has been developed exclusively for x86 systems: exclusively those built on x86 chips—Intel or AMD chips.
That is not true. See here. It is ARM native for Apple silicon as interpreted by MacOS’s own activity monitor. There is no Rosetta translation going on here.
The article continues:
But Apple has a weak spot: gaming. Almost all games today, be they intended for PC or console, are built for x86 systems. Apple had sought to sort of get around this with the Game Compatibility Toolkit, which is a tool to get games running on ARM, but it’s not being used to actually bring a larger gaming library to Apple devices just yet. Qualcomm’s comparable tool, however, is.
So I’d take whatever else they state with a bucket of salt, they’re just wrong and they didn’t bother to check.
On the one hand, it’s impressive it “just works” at all considering it’s probably the biggest question for ARM PCs. On the other hand, this game in particular runs at a higher framerate and resolution on their main competition (M3) . Kind of a weird flex.
Last week Snapdragon claimed that Windows games “just work” on its latest ARM chip, the Snapdragon X Elite. At the time we said we’d believe it when we see it. Well, now we’re seeing it. A small glimpse of it, anyways
So are we seeing it or are we seeing a small glimpse of it?
Yes.
Seeing a glimpse of it is still seeing it technically
I don’t get it. does the Snapdragon X Elite have some sort of hardware emulation built in then?
I’m pretty sure Microsoft will be developing software emulation layer for Windows ARM, so it can support backwards compatibility on as many kinds of ARM processors as possible. But since Snapdragon is only claiming that this works on the X Elite, it’s either a matter of performance, or hardware restrictions?
Microsoft has a translation layer like Rosetta. It’s called Prism.
I dont’ see how it can run at all without some sort of emulation. the architecture is completely different.
The mac chips do this with rosetta
yeah I get that. im curious why this chip says its runs windows x86 right off the bat. at least that is what it sounds like to me from the article but maybe im misunderstanding. so it sounds to me like it has some sort of hardware emulation to x86.
It does. Apple has Rosetta and Microsoft has Prism. They are effectively the same thing, being a translation layer for x86 to ARM.
yeah but its in the os not the hardware, no?
I think you are misunderstanding the article.
Windows for ARM is designed specifically for ARM, and it has the translation layer. The translation layer effectively allows it to function as if it’s running an x86 Windows install off the bat by offering the ability to run x86 applications on the ARM hardware. It’s not actually running an x86 OS.
The chipset is very powerful but it doesn’t require additional hardware to achieve this translation. The additional processing power built into these chips are NPUs (Neural Processing Units) which are designed to more effectively run ML/AI/LLM workloads. The translation system just works on the normal raw processing power of the machine, just the same as the M-series Macs.
