I was browsing on system76’s offering to see what PCs they have and noticed that they have an ARM Computer that apparently faster than the fastest Apple Mac but for cheaper (Based), but I’m wondering, how well does ARM computers game on linux with proton, it is very expensive to me atm and I can’t afford it, but maybe in the future I could consider it to be my first desktop as I always been using laptops, obviously gaming isn’t like the main priority as I would like a workstation to do heavy work such as blender and stuff and perhaps put gentoo on it in the future (if its supported) but I would like to game on the side when I’m winding down that’s all, so can it game well?

  • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
    4·
    13 hours ago

    you could probably put a decent graphics card in it, but it might be buggy on ARM. and youd have to set up box64 or something, which may still come with its own share of problems. not sure how dxvk proton and the compatibility layers for games work on it either.

    ARM is still not quite there yet for gaming. interesting little machine though.

  • zarenki@lemmy.ml
    13·
    2 days ago

    With one of these Altra CPUs (Q64-22), I can compile the Linux kernel (defconfig aarch64 with modules on GCC 15.1) in 3m8s with -j64. Really great for compiling, and much lower power draw than any x86 system with a comparable core count. Idles at 68W full system power, pulls 130W when all cores are under full load. Pulling out some of my 4 RAM sticks can drive that down a lot more than you’d expect for just RAM. lm_sensors claims the “CPU Power” is 16W and 56W in those two situations.

    Should be awful for gaming. It’s possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread) suffers a lot. I run a few containers where the performance hit really doesn’t matter through qemu.

    Ampere has a weird PCIe bug that results in either outright incompatibility or a video output filled with strange artifacts/distortion for the vast majority of GPUs, with the known good selection that aren’t bugged being only a few select Nvidia ones. I don’t happen to have any of those Nvidia cards but this workstation includes one. Other non-GPU PCIe things like NICs, NVMe, and SAS storage controllers work great, with tons of PCIe lanes.

    • moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
      2·
      17 hours ago

      Should be awful for gaming. It’s possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread)

      Most modern software (games excluded), is dynamically compiled. This means that it’s not all one “bundle” that runs, but rather a binary that calls reusable pieces of code, “libraries” from the binary itself. Wine is dynamically compiled.

      What makes modern x86 to arm translators special, is that the x86 binary, like an x86 version of wine, can call upon the arm versions of the libraries it uses ­— like graphic drivers. It’s because of this that the people on r/emulationonandroid managed to play GTA 5 with 30 fps via the computer version. There definitely is overhead, but it’s not that much, and a beefy machine like this could absolutely handle it.

      https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/blog/scale-22/#exhibition-hall

      The Facebook/Meta table had a booth where they had an ARM macbook that was running steam and they were installing games on it.

      • zarenki@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        15 hours ago

        “Dynamically compiled” and dynamic linking are very different things, and in turn dynamic linking is completely different from system calls and inter-process communication. I’m no emulation expert but I’m pretty sure you can’t just swap out a dynamically linked library for a different architecture’s build for it at link time and expect the ABI to somehow work out, unless you only do this with a small few manually vetted libraries where you can clean up the ABI. Calling into drivers or communicating with other processes that run as the native architecture is generally fine, at least.

        I don’t know how much Asahi makes use of the capability (if at all), but Apple’s M series processors add special architecture extensions that makes x86 emulation be able to perform much better than on any other ARM system.

        I wouldn’t deny that you can get a lot of things playable enough, but this is very much not hardware you get for the purpose of gaming: getting a CPU and motherboard combo that costs $1440 (64-core 2.2GHz) or $2350 (128-core 2.6GHz) that performs substantially worse at most games than a $300 Ryzen CPU+motherboard combo (and has GPU compatibility quirks to boot) will be very disappointing if that’s what you want it for. Though the same could to a lesser extent be said even about x86 workstations that prioritize core count like Xeon/Epyc/Threadripper. For compiling code, running automated tests, and other highly threaded workloads, this hardware is quite a treat.

        • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          14 hours ago

          You’re right, my bad. Dynamic linking and dynamic compilation are different thinks.

          The library inter operation is a part of the translation layers that, like fex-emu which is becoming more and more supported by Fedora.

          https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/blob/main/ThunkLibs/README.md

          manually vetted libraries where you can clean up the ABI

          Yes, but usually games are ran with wine which does have a standard set of libraries it uses.

  • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
    39·
    2 days ago

    I think Jeff Geerling made a video trying to game on a similar arm system with mixed results. I’m sure it would work, since you can game on a Raspberry Pi using Box86/64, just probably not too well for the money

    • Ace120C@sopuli.xyzOP
      9·
      2 days ago

      I watched his video, but he didn’t cover that in great detail unfortunately, I was wondering if someone already owns one so he can tell me his review about it

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    191·
    2 days ago

    The Ampre Altra runs from 32 to 128 cores (dear gods that’s beautiful), but with that architecture, and the company’s stated purpose, it makes more sense in a computer meant to be used as a server rather than a desktop gaming rig. You’d use a chip like that in a Kubernetes cluster for example.

    Combined with an Nvidia card, a brand notorious for being a Pain In The Ass in Linuxland, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the intended purpose of a box like this is a server for AI/ML-based services.

    • Ace120C@sopuli.xyzOP
      42·
      2 days ago

      a freaking love the specs but godddddd…I wish this bloody thing was general purpose, it’ll be so perfect, like imagine this thing compiling gentoo with dwm…maaaaaan

      • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I mean, you can buy it and use it in a general purpose fashion, and yeah, those cores would do wonders for all sorts of compiles. Also, it can be useful if you’re like me and do a lot of Dockerised development. Given that most games are x86 only though, sadly this would be no good :-(

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    321·
    2 days ago

    If I paid so much money it better game the shit out of games. But I honestly doubt ARM can with the overhead of emulation. And they don’t even specify what kind of nvidia graphics it has. This tells me that the system isn’t really meant to be used for gaming.

    • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      ut I honestly doubt ARM can with the overhead of emulation

      Most modern software (games excluded), is dynamically compiled. This means that it’s not all one “bundle” that runs, but rather a binary that calls reusable pieces of code, “libraries” from the binary itself. Wine is dynamically compiled.

      What makes modern x86 to arm translators special, is that the x86 binary, like an x86 version of wine, can call upon the arm versions of the libraries it uses ­— like graphic drivers. It’s because of this that the people on r/emulationonandroid managed to play GTA 5 with 30 fps via the computer version. There definitely is overhead, but it’s not that much, and a beefy machine like this could absolutely handle it.

      https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/blog/scale-22/#exhibition-hall

      The Facebook/Meta table had a booth where they had an ARM macbook that was running steam and they were installing games on it.

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
      161·
      2 days ago

      If I paid so much money it better game the shit out of games.

      Laughs in Apple

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    It should be able to run games that support ARM. That means you are pretty much limited to open source games. The CPU clock speed is fairly low, so don’t expect great performance. These systems are intended for heavily multithreaded workloads.