Few thoughts after doing this: - It's a deeper rabbit hole than this one, but most of what I do in this video can be done on an Android phone. - The stuff that I had to do to get Box64 to work with Steam is not required anymore, BUT you need a lot of RAM to use the new version that has a working login window. If you have a phone/SBC with less RAM, it might be worth waiting for more improvements or you can just do what I did. - When translation software improves (and drivers), I believe we will see companies that release ARM gaming handhelds that are made for local PC gaming. Cost, heat, and power consumption being the biggest motivators.
Once we get a Mainline Linux Kernel we'll have far more gaming potential than what was possible on earlier ARM CPUs like the S922X, A311D, and RK3399! I recommend Micro Linux's TH-cam channel for advice on how to get this stuff running.
Yes, and... no? The solutions so far I've seen use a hacky version of VirGL and Venus passthrough to a Linux ((container)) and runs games through. Super Hacky with some serious performance issues.
Box86 situation is like the times of the early days of wine. So many struggles to get things working. I still remember how happy I was to run some 3D windows games on my linux box
It honestly makes me wonder what a properly utilised modern arm chip like the snapdragon 8 gen 2 could do. I mean hell, we saw what came from the Tegra X1 in the Switch. Also Borderlands 2 looks like the Vita port lol.
Sadly drivers for ARM SoC GPUs are pretty pants. Either they have serious bugs or performance issues or both. If someone designed a console from scratch with their own drivers (ala Sony PS4/5) then I'm sure it wouldn't be an issue.
I tend to think and work at the microcontroller/DSP/FPGA side of things... I don't think many people realize just how poorly optimized most computer hardware is, these days. Back in the 80s and 90s, the cost of new hardwarw was considerably greater than the cost of optimization, particularly because things were still comprehensible from a human standpoint. Memory mapping a 386 program might get a bit crazy, but you could do it and follow things through the registers. The newest ryzen comes with... what... 40+ megabytes of cpu cache and has 32 integer pipelines and 16 floating point/vector units? That's a big flow chart and a lot of graph paper. Even the modest arm cores these days are 4+ core ... amalgamations of integer and floating point units with different instruction sets and then some kind of GPU attached. The fact that a pi pico (rp2040) can run doom at native resolution is kind of insane. We will hit the die shrink limit before 2030 (avoiding the end of the world, provided) and while there will no doubt be hardware innovations from there, it will be really interesting to see what comes from coding optimizations.
@@Aim54Delta optimizations don't sell processors though. AMD can't say "look what OTHER people can do with our stuff" they need to say "look how fast OUR stuff is"
@@MrGamelover23 The lattice constant of silicon is something like 0.7 nanometers and we will be at 1 nanometer market standard nodes by 2030. While we could explore some novel structures or semiconductors to try and get more ideal performance or pump higher powers... we're soon to be at the end of simple performance gains. We either will need some variety of new paradigms of computing operation or some kind of new physics paradigm... some force or process completely unknown. Even then, whatever that is gets instantly incorporated at the current nanoscale fabrication paradigm. If a diamond processor is radically more powerful in concept, then we roll it into the state of the art fab processes and don't see the incremental improvements like before. This is also why I suspect we will see more open source programs in the future. AMD was ahead of the curve when they split off their fab process. Already, die design and structure has become significantly more important than raw performance. We saw this as far back as netburst vs k8 (which was my stomping grounds in pc building). Branch prediction, cache efficiency, and instruction set features are considerably more important than raw hertz. Performance may be a bit more difficult to market, but it certainly sells and the market figures out what it needs ... for the most part. Performance can be a bit relative, and we have seen divergent designs - power efficient designs, 'gaming' designs, and network/data designs. Even going back to netburst - while the K8 kicked the bejeesus out of the netburst cores in gaming performance - if you wanted to render raytrace scenes or compress/decompress data, the design quirks of the netburst paid off and made it vastly superior in those tasks. Kind of like how an ASIC or FPGA can run circles around graphics cards in sha256 hashing (which is why cryptoknight is used for monero, the algo isn't as easy to vector through a pipeline). For comparison, the first computer I built was an Athlon 64 3700+ (k8) on a 939 socket clocked at 2.4ghz with 512 megabytes of memory (4G max, which I ultimately upgraded to). The graphics card was an nvidia geforce 9700... with 256megs of onboard vram if memory serves. Back in 2005. The $200 fanless laptop I bought a year ago uses an athlon silver which is basically two improved k8 cores at 2.4ghz. It's hard to know if the embedded graphics core matches the 7900 from 2005... but I expect it probably kicks the crap out of the first computer I built in most regards. The banana and orange pi examples I bought to play with as raspberry pi competitors come with generally more powerful hardware and all of them each possess the kind of raw computing power to automate the entire factory I work in (in principle, at least). We're almost at the point where improvements in computing performance are only critical to a certain set of the market, as most of what exists, today, is more than capable of most things people use computers for.
I remember seeing a Chinese PC with Linux, running a custom ARM processor and RX550. It's called the Phytium D2000. If more people experiment like you, these projects have serious potential.
@@shlokshah5379 really? its way more efficient, could result in cpus getting so much faster. if code is compiled for arm then arm pcs may actually make sense.
Finally someone covered this. I've been really interested in x86 emulation on ARM lately and i think the potential for this is incredible. There is a rumor than Valve is funding development of FEX Emu, which is why it is compatible with steam. The entire purpose of fex emu is to run steam games on arm. I do think in a couple of years we might see an arm client by Valve and a linux container for Android like how they created a linux container for ChromeOS. This could be huge for Arm gaming.
This is kinda insane, the implications of performance is really huge for future handheld devices (specifically performance and battery life). very exciting!
This is literally one of the coolest projects I have ever seen. You have Herculean patience to have gone through as much of this as you have. Also the next big question is, if Valve offered/supported ARM would that be a low cost/low power option for the next version of the Steam Deck?
If the translation was good enough, an ARM chip would be the best chance to get something that had significantly more battery life than the current Deck. This processor was ~$40. Snapdragon processors that are $100-$175 are monsters in terms of what they would be able to do.
@@TakiUdon And IF that happened, how long before something like HoloISO was available for other ARM based devices and platforms? I'm going to be nerding out to this idea all weekend. Thanks again for all the incredible work!
a steamdeck lite with arm support and the rk3588 would be amazing. i really think that if a couple platforms/manufacturers like valve embraced arm, we would quickly see arm devices outpacing x86 devices in most circumstances. valve have already proven that they can improve linux support by orders of magnitude by making a single compelling device. we just need someone to do the same for arm
@@xomm Apple's GPU core sucks bad. Apple fans just sweep that fact under the rug. A Steam Deck has a much better GPU core and doesn't eat much power either.
@@KAMiKAZOW amd already made gpu chip with collaboration with Samsung but don't think another exynos rdna chip will be released though cause Samsung mobile decided to use Snapdragon to all their product
Hey, thanks so much for making this video! I've definitely been super interested to see someone really do a deep dive into the subject, and I think you really did it justice! There's definitely a lot of BS to go through to get this working, but as the open source tools improve and drivers mature this process will only get easier, so I think it's really important for people to start thinking about it now, because with every new ARM chip released we're going to see more and more people who could just switch over to a $200 10 watt SBC, and be happy. What happens when we get a 4600G level of performance in an ARM chip? 1135G7? A 6800U? A 7640H?
I feel like we've videos like this arm native PC gaming is going to really pop off in the next maybe two to three years!!!!!!! Seeing that it is even possible in the first place might really motivate those with the skills to make this more possible and available to the wider masses!!!!! Excellent job on the video, obviously a lot of hard work has gone into it!
What a fantastic video. The combination of ARM64 and games is daunting enough, but adding in x86, Steam, Wine was completely unexpected. Thanks for working so hard on this!
Awesome job Taki, can't even imagine the hellhole of research this needed.... Important point in the end of the video, if Valve decided to work with arm based processors, it could do for smartphones and tablets what they are doing for Linux on PC, and it'd be amazing, even more now that arm based SoCs are getting so powerful. A man can dream, right? xD
This is simply the most interesting prospect of gamming outside of x86 I saw in the last 5 years... I cannot believe companies like valve aren't pushing for this
I mean if the steam deck had an ARM cpu with a decent GPU in it and with some actual money behind it, the cost would be lower the performance might even be better, its like the version of rainbow six siege that they made run on an ARM CPU years ago and it was hitting really high fps. This is something worth funding and would change gaming for the better
@@nolo1337 Yes, exactly that... This would be amazing for handleheld devices and even better "console" like devices to be used in the living rom like nvidia did with the Shield TV it was(kinda of still is) a banger at the time, but was too propriertary and had no PC compatibility whatsoever.
That's because companies are tired of pulling out devs from common game engines that works in one specific os with one specific architecture and one specific api despite how superior cross platform game engines are.
@@fltfathin That hypothesis doesn't work because Valve is pushing hard in linux gaming supporting the development of Wine, Proton and other tools. With that being said, it is true that going from Windows x64 to Linux x64 is way easier than going from Windows x64 to Linux ARM64.
The shoddy driver situation is the main blocker right now. Honestly, phones and SBCs alike would perform so much better if SoC makers pushed all their stuff to mainline and contributed to Mesa the way AMD and Intel do. Because of this, the FSFE made an open letter asking for “The universal right to install any software on any device” to legislators in the European Union in 2022 (also, if the memory management issues regarding the amdgpu driver on ARM were resolved, we could get desktop-class GPUs running on these boards, at least the ones with PCIe, and some of those Chinese GPU OEMs that convert laptop AMD and NVIDIA processors to PCIe could find themselves integrating their designs into ARM SBCs, but that's an entirely different beast). The other thing I wish SoC makers exposed from the chips is virtualization support. All modern ARM chips support virtualization, but KVM is broken on everything Qualcomm because they hog EL2 at the bootloader level with random, proprietary black box junk posing as a hypervisor, but at least that situation may change starting with Android 13 devices because Google started asking manufacturers to expose that functionality for Android. That, and I'm also waiting on Hangover to get polished further. Hangover takes a more direct route to x86 Windows software emulation, meaning less non-native code that needs to go through dynamic recompilation. Potentially better performance.
Dear god, the amount of translations this is running for that performance is insane, is like seing an old skyline barely working held together by duck tape hit 200mph in a drag race, im too lazy to run all those patches myself but for sure some wizard of the linux comunity will release a distro with all of those at some point, if valve put some efort in those arm drivers them we will have some serious Steam Deck competition, RockChip SOCs arent that great so if the an arm distro is launched and people can install them in some SnapDragon device like logitechs or razers them damn those devices will gather a insane amount of value. Great content as always Taki (y)
Your first time compiling a kernel... Remember that feeling of "oh hell is this gonna work, what am I even doing? This is gonna take how long?" (8 hours later) it worked! (Or) lather rinse repeat till it works Nothing like that first time... Pretty soon you'll be rolling out your own kernels with the teeniest optimizations just to see what you can get the slowest SBC you have to do
I swear I had to double read because I saw "kernel compile" and your name starting with J. Jeff Gearling probably knows a thing or two about this stuff tho :P
Box86/64, Mesa, and x86toARM translation has gotten really far! Wow! If this goes far enough I think a platform backer like valve could propel a Proton-like effect for ARM on PCs....though the whole Linux ecosystem has to pull teeth to get the ARM chip makers to cooperate as it is . _.
This might be my favorite Taki video. Box86 and company are one of the more interesting software projects around and game choice was awesome. Loved seeing Gothic 2, Morrowind, Warcraft and Doom 3. So many memories.
Software dev here and I’ve been considering getting into GPU driver work. The only thing keeping me from doing it is that there are teams out there working on panfork for example and it’s still nowhere near where it should be. But anyways. Maybe one day. Amazing work! I really don’t know how you could be this patient.
Respect man that's a huge amount of effort to make a video when the main headache is graphics driver support for arm sbc as there's very little official software for sbc owners for this item .
20:08 Your lips to Gabe's ears. Having been in the Pi Box86 scene some time ago, I wonder if there was a way to get past the login issue using SteamCMD credentials, but a ARM native client would be amazing to play with, especially when Vulkan graphics start to come into their own.
Wow....... thats really crazy man. Gaming is just getting nuts and its exciting seeing it going in all different directions. Especially in todays climate due to high prices ect. Awesome vid and im glad i stumbled onto it. Subbed!
The amount of progress ARM chips have gotten over the years is wild to me, I have an ODROID U2 that I barely use now because it's dog slow and struggles with linux for some unknown reason (Probably actually the SD card it's installed on now I think about it) but you have a unit like this that's running games well. Amazing. One day I'll build a gaming PC the size of a NUC that runs all my childhood games perfectly. I look forward to that day.
Try running Bleach bit on the SD card. its likely bloated with OS crap and your test apps. same as old Windows 98 XP Vista on old slow PCs was wonderful out of the box then degraded over time.
@@joefish6091 I'm going to try this anyway, but it's slow on fresh installs too. I'm notorious for using SD cards I found in phones in the tech bin that don't have a speed rating, could be that too.
Awesome video! This is the part of tech youtube that i love so much. Janky windows compatibility layer on top of janky X86 compat layer alongside janky forked GPU driver on top of janky hardware (jank considering how wildly things seemingly vary in the ARM ecosystem with u-boot and devicetrees and other crazy stuff, compared to x86/wintel where you just pop in a boot device and select it with the graphical UEFI setup) running a janky custom built kernel. Jank on top of jank, but it's just lovely especially when things work out in the end. Especially appreciated your persistence in getting steam to work.
This was excellent, it's really shame we do not have proper graphic drivers for this ARM chips, this one is not the only one who suffers from this issue, pretty much every SBC have this problem. Chinese devs does not invest much in software...
This is really cool, it's the closest thing to have steam mobile gaming and I hope steam will support and push arm-pc linux gaming to the masses just like steam deck with linux gaming.
Dude, you've absolutely outdone yourself. I thought this would just be a small video. But nooo I was wrong, this is insane! Edit: now getting all of this to run on an arm mobile phone is gunna be cool af. Unfortunately I have the exynos variants of Samsungs note 20 ultra and s22 ultra, but seeing it run on snapdragon will be insane!
ARM has come such a long way. It's amazing to see we've come full circle. This solves a lot of the problems with efficiency and power consumption. Apple was correct to bet on ARM and I hope that software companies start to see the light as well. It would be awesome to see Valve toy with the concept and optimize their Steam Deck concept for the either ARM or RISCV
I have perched and dived into this rabbit hole many, many, many times, and fiddle with these devices in the professional setting for many reasons. Its amazing to see somebody disseminate the complexity of how all these things interact. As to who is responsible for the GPU driver problem, the answer is: nobody. Nobody is responsible. That is the problem. Also, I might be wrong, but you could try logging into steam through steams cli utility to bypass the login screen issues.
This will definitely be of interest to many. You should pick 3 games (1 for box86, 1 for box64 and 1 for wine) and do a step by step tutorial for getting things working. Exagear also seems to be a useful utility to get PC games working.
This is INCREDIBLY cool. It's clear that the hardware made by smaller vendors like RochChip (or basically any android SOC) is very very. Capable. It is just layers of software that is holding it back. Once we establish the proper software ecosystem we will be able to do incredible things with very cheap chips
Curious where did you get the $40 quote for the chip? Ive been having trouble sourcing the chip for a custom SBC project i have lined up. Also use panfrost driver for Vulkan and OpenGL support in linux.
as others allready said the time that you spend to test all the things out i dont want to know. just tweaking to find good workign drivers is allready heave. HUGE respect! thanks for this massive overview. hopefully one day steam will support Aarch64
If someone could build a full OS with all these features out of the box and steamdeck UI that would make this thing a promising cheap retro/indie PC gaming solution!
talking about gaming is great, but I'd love to see what kind of work there could be done in this machine. I guess installing an arm-compatible linux distro with a minimal install and a WM instead of a DE would make this a very usable little machine
My RK3588s consumes 1.7W at idle in Linux desktop connected to 4K monitor (web browsing). In Full Load it consumes 8W. I have 16GB RAM Orange Pi 5. 16GB RAM is great for server purpose after I will upgrade ARM desktop for something more powerful. BTW this RK3588 chip uses very good ARM Cortex A76 cores: - A76 has IPC (performance per GHz) similar to Intel Skylake or AMD Ryzen 3000 ..... that's very good. - A76 has IPC about 2x than Raspberry Pi 4 (using Cortex A72) .... that's huge difference - A76 was designed as 1st ARM core with desktop performance to fight/beat x86 PC processors - A76 was released in 2018 and clearly beating AMD Zen1 from 2017 and matching Zen 2 from 2019 (mission acomplished) How are the later ARM Cortexes? - Cortex A77 from 2019 was about 15% IPC jump so beating Zen 2 and Intel IceLake - Cortex X1 from 2020 was up 25% in IPC and was beating Zen 3 at least in 10% IPC - Cortex X2 from 2021 was mild jump about 10% IPC beating even Intel Alder Lake (using gigantic and power hungry Golden Cove) - X2 was interesting that it was 1st CPU using new ARMv9 with 2048-bit SVE2 vectors. Also 1st Cortex core 64-bit only (no 32-bit ARMv7 support for old SW) - Cortex X3 has low 10% IPC jump which beats Intel Raptor Lake and Zen 4 about 10-15% in IPC. Just extending the lead over PC processors. - X3 is very interesting from RAW performance units: X3 is first CPU having 8 executing units for scalar (general purpose) computation (Zen 4 and Raptor lake have only 5 EU). - this means that architecture laid by X3 is very advanced in compare to Intel and AMD. So there is solid base for X4 and X5 to bring another 30% IPC uplift. Game over x86, it was nice time but it's time to rest in peace at grave yard of proprietary. Long live open tech ARM and RISC-V.
I really wish Rockchip would contribute to open source, or at least give the community the tools to make some open source drivers, I think it would make their products more popular. That said, I may have to find a RK3588 system to toy around with.
The horrors you've faced, this is why I definitely wait for the experts to work this out before buying a product. Just don't have enough patience for all that headache! It's pretty cool work!
If Valve could get the overall software and driver situation figured out, an ARM version of the Steam Deck would be a massive game changer, even more disruptive than the original. The most complaints for the Deck by far have been for battery life, which is inescapably pinned to the power hungry nature of x86-64 architecture.
from the gles2 benchmarking software the GLES performance of the Panfrost drivers are ~25-40% OF (not lower than) the binary blob drivers. I recently got an Orange Pi 5 and have been reading forums etc to figure out whats going on. Not going to speculate here like you say not sure of who or what is to blame. Its frustrating though that the Gpu drivers as underselling the hardware as much as they currently do. I'm only 2/3rds into your video and will watch the rest. Iv'e been trying to look for a way to run SF IV on a board like this maybe I'm hoping for too much but I'll take a look at what you're doing here! :D Thanks for super cool video!
There is an Android version of SF IV you can use in the meantime, it has controller support (tho you need to use screen to select options etc) - it's the worst version of the game but, it's still amazing
@@anthonypimentel7218 Thanks for the tip! :) I was thinking of trying the 3DS version with Citra but didn't want to as it looks pretty bad. Do you know/think the Android version is better than the 3DS version? Something would be better than nothing! :)
@@anthonypimentel7218 You made me look again and I found a video of someone running through Wine on a Snapdragon Android phone. It looks pretty good! :) Video is called, Street Fighter IV (Windows) Android Gameplay | Exagear Emulator Wine 6.0 v3.2
Maybe I'm wrong but those Doom 3 stats sounded pretty darn good for that little processor. I remember when that game was new and needed a pretty high end rig to run at high settings.
Many thanks to showcase BOX86/64. I would add than you can just use goldberg to run most steam games without steam, both windows and linux ones. BOX86/64 makes sense on cheaper SoCs tho, since you can get an x86_64 platform for that price...
Imagine a steam deck lite with arm chip running pc games like the steam deck do. Apple already has the m1 and m2 chips and probably steam investing in this x86_64 layer windows might be in hot waters in the future. That would be a gamechanger fr
I don't think that Apple would share any of their chip. That being said, Snapdragon Oryon that is supposed to release next year is rumored to be comparable to the M series
The performance and power of the RK3588 is the reason why I bought myself a Orange Pi 5 aside from its price. Its Android emulation performance by far has blown me away.
This was entertaining, thank you. Comparing the performance to an entry level x86 mini PC would be nice. Liliputing reported about Intel N100 based devices starting at around 150$ - thats 10$ more than NanoPi R6S with case, though you need to add storage (but you need that for ARM SBC as well, as built in eMMC isn't that capacious most of the time). I guess that older Ryzen based mini PCs with decent Vega GPUs are still on the market as well. ARM is very efficient, but entry level low power x86 chips are also way better than they used to be. I suppose that N100 plays original Skyrim just fine, as I was able to run it almost a decade ago on 3317U iGPU. I might be wrong, though. It might be easier to have an x86 device and tinker when wanting to run google store app than the other way around. But maybe not - I submit an idea for another video here.
I remember having to buy a voodoo2 back in the day to play the likes of tomb raider 2. I don't even remember what i had for doom3. Seeing such a tiny cheap chip with low power consumption, running those games well in spite of having no real support for it ... just wow. I hope proper support comes soon. I look forward to run gaming servers with low power consumption. Having ARM cpus being properly supported by more OS's and Applications... would be great.
I think the best you can do is compile Proton/Wine to ARM, just like Wine can be compiled to ARM, and it can work much better than doube emulation (box86/64+wine/proton)
I already knew this!!! I've been saying for months that once we get a Mainline Linux Kernel for RK3588 processors we'll be gaming like kings on ARM processors.
When I got my first rpi, I've thought about this potential, it'd be awesome to run my ancient MMORPG on it, and now it's almost reality, this is so cool.
Go find some mini-ITX Atom PCs or similar, or an AMD SoC mobo, theres plenty of usable mini PCs out there for very little money. they are comparable to ARM PI type units in power.
Few thoughts after doing this:
- It's a deeper rabbit hole than this one, but most of what I do in this video can be done on an Android phone.
- The stuff that I had to do to get Box64 to work with Steam is not required anymore, BUT you need a lot of RAM to use the new version that has a working login window. If you have a phone/SBC with less RAM, it might be worth waiting for more improvements or you can just do what I did.
- When translation software improves (and drivers), I believe we will see companies that release ARM gaming handhelds that are made for local PC gaming. Cost, heat, and power consumption being the biggest motivators.
Once we get a Mainline Linux Kernel we'll have far more gaming potential than what was possible on earlier ARM CPUs like the S922X, A311D, and RK3399! I recommend Micro Linux's TH-cam channel for advice on how to get this stuff running.
How does games like Overlord and Deltagal run on here?
Make this video in phone version(8XX,8 Gen x), break the limit feel good
Do you think you would be able to release a script of all those steps you took?
Yes, and... no? The solutions so far I've seen use a hacky version of VirGL and Venus passthrough to a Linux ((container)) and runs games through. Super Hacky with some serious performance issues.
The extent of work that you've gone through to make this work is impressive. Huge respect!
Box86 situation is like the times of the early days of wine. So many struggles to get things working. I still remember how happy I was to run some 3D windows games on my linux box
It honestly makes me wonder what a properly utilised modern arm chip like the snapdragon 8 gen 2 could do. I mean hell, we saw what came from the Tegra X1 in the Switch.
Also Borderlands 2 looks like the Vita port lol.
Closest we have to that is Surface Pro 9 5G
Sadly drivers for ARM SoC GPUs are pretty pants.
Either they have serious bugs or performance issues or both.
If someone designed a console from scratch with their own drivers (ala Sony PS4/5) then I'm sure it wouldn't be an issue.
I tend to think and work at the microcontroller/DSP/FPGA side of things... I don't think many people realize just how poorly optimized most computer hardware is, these days. Back in the 80s and 90s, the cost of new hardwarw was considerably greater than the cost of optimization, particularly because things were still comprehensible from a human standpoint. Memory mapping a 386 program might get a bit crazy, but you could do it and follow things through the registers. The newest ryzen comes with... what... 40+ megabytes of cpu cache and has 32 integer pipelines and 16 floating point/vector units? That's a big flow chart and a lot of graph paper.
Even the modest arm cores these days are 4+ core ... amalgamations of integer and floating point units with different instruction sets and then some kind of GPU attached.
The fact that a pi pico (rp2040) can run doom at native resolution is kind of insane.
We will hit the die shrink limit before 2030 (avoiding the end of the world, provided) and while there will no doubt be hardware innovations from there, it will be really interesting to see what comes from coding optimizations.
@@Aim54Delta optimizations don't sell processors though. AMD can't say "look what OTHER people can do with our stuff" they need to say "look how fast OUR stuff is"
@@MrGamelover23
The lattice constant of silicon is something like 0.7 nanometers and we will be at 1 nanometer market standard nodes by 2030.
While we could explore some novel structures or semiconductors to try and get more ideal performance or pump higher powers... we're soon to be at the end of simple performance gains. We either will need some variety of new paradigms of computing operation or some kind of new physics paradigm... some force or process completely unknown.
Even then, whatever that is gets instantly incorporated at the current nanoscale fabrication paradigm. If a diamond processor is radically more powerful in concept, then we roll it into the state of the art fab processes and don't see the incremental improvements like before.
This is also why I suspect we will see more open source programs in the future. AMD was ahead of the curve when they split off their fab process. Already, die design and structure has become significantly more important than raw performance. We saw this as far back as netburst vs k8 (which was my stomping grounds in pc building). Branch prediction, cache efficiency, and instruction set features are considerably more important than raw hertz. Performance may be a bit more difficult to market, but it certainly sells and the market figures out what it needs ... for the most part. Performance can be a bit relative, and we have seen divergent designs - power efficient designs, 'gaming' designs, and network/data designs. Even going back to netburst - while the K8 kicked the bejeesus out of the netburst cores in gaming performance - if you wanted to render raytrace scenes or compress/decompress data, the design quirks of the netburst paid off and made it vastly superior in those tasks.
Kind of like how an ASIC or FPGA can run circles around graphics cards in sha256 hashing (which is why cryptoknight is used for monero, the algo isn't as easy to vector through a pipeline).
For comparison, the first computer I built was an Athlon 64 3700+ (k8) on a 939 socket clocked at 2.4ghz with 512 megabytes of memory (4G max, which I ultimately upgraded to). The graphics card was an nvidia geforce 9700... with 256megs of onboard vram if memory serves.
Back in 2005.
The $200 fanless laptop I bought a year ago uses an athlon silver which is basically two improved k8 cores at 2.4ghz. It's hard to know if the embedded graphics core matches the 7900 from 2005... but I expect it probably kicks the crap out of the first computer I built in most regards.
The banana and orange pi examples I bought to play with as raspberry pi competitors come with generally more powerful hardware and all of them each possess the kind of raw computing power to automate the entire factory I work in (in principle, at least).
We're almost at the point where improvements in computing performance are only critical to a certain set of the market, as most of what exists, today, is more than capable of most things people use computers for.
I remember seeing a Chinese PC with Linux, running a custom ARM processor and RX550. It's called the Phytium D2000. If more people experiment like you, these projects have serious potential.
Arm probably doesn't make sense on a pc.
@@shlokshah5379 really? its way more efficient, could result in cpus getting so much faster. if code is compiled for arm then arm pcs may actually make sense.
Finally someone covered this. I've been really interested in x86 emulation on ARM lately and i think the potential for this is incredible. There is a rumor than Valve is funding development of FEX Emu, which is why it is compatible with steam. The entire purpose of fex emu is to run steam games on arm. I do think in a couple of years we might see an arm client by Valve and a linux container for Android like how they created a linux container for ChromeOS. This could be huge for Arm gaming.
Check out Nico D and Micro Linux's Channels. They make videos on running programs and games on SBC's.
Rumor has it that Valve's new VR headset actually has an arm chip.
@@MrGamelover23it will be fully wireless too i guess
Damn, when Doom 3 came out I struggled to run it at 1024x768 on my desktop. This is amazing.
This is kinda insane, the implications of performance is really huge for future handheld devices (specifically performance and battery life). very exciting!
The prices are insane.
This is literally one of the coolest projects I have ever seen. You have Herculean patience to have gone through as much of this as you have. Also the next big question is, if Valve offered/supported ARM would that be a low cost/low power option for the next version of the Steam Deck?
If the translation was good enough, an ARM chip would be the best chance to get something that had significantly more battery life than the current Deck. This processor was ~$40. Snapdragon processors that are $100-$175 are monsters in terms of what they would be able to do.
@@TakiUdon And IF that happened, how long before something like HoloISO was available for other ARM based devices and platforms? I'm going to be nerding out to this idea all weekend. Thanks again for all the incredible work!
@@iG34RH34D you might wanna check out chroot, termux, exagear and other stuff
@@iG34RH34D here is Witcher 2 running on Box86 on Snapdragon 845 phone
th-cam.com/video/K8IaoIwUJ7k/w-d-xo.html
Them the "Nintendo Switch Killer" tagline would finally be true
Huge respect to you. If there is an open standard for these SOCs, then we can see native support for ARM from Steam. This will go a long way.
"It's really powerful there's just no software support" -Literally every single Rockchip SoC ever released.
bcuz its true? they can kinda run modern games, ppl just dont wanna support it
a steamdeck lite with arm support and the rk3588 would be amazing. i really think that if a couple platforms/manufacturers like valve embraced arm, we would quickly see arm devices outpacing x86 devices in most circumstances. valve have already proven that they can improve linux support by orders of magnitude by making a single compelling device. we just need someone to do the same for arm
If only Apple would release Apple Silicon in a handheld gaming form factor…
@@MaddTheSane Apple Silicon would be killer in a gaming handheld, but then driver support would still be ass unfortunately.
Too bad nobody makes good GPU cores for ARM. Nvidia could do it but they don't care.
@@xomm Apple's GPU core sucks bad. Apple fans just sweep that fact under the rug. A Steam Deck has a much better GPU core and doesn't eat much power either.
@@KAMiKAZOW amd already made gpu chip with collaboration with Samsung but don't think another exynos rdna chip will be released though cause Samsung mobile decided to use Snapdragon to all their product
Hey, thanks so much for making this video! I've definitely been super interested to see someone really do a deep dive into the subject, and I think you really did it justice! There's definitely a lot of BS to go through to get this working, but as the open source tools improve and drivers mature this process will only get easier, so I think it's really important for people to start thinking about it now, because with every new ARM chip released we're going to see more and more people who could just switch over to a $200 10 watt SBC, and be happy. What happens when we get a 4600G level of performance in an ARM chip? 1135G7? A 6800U? A 7640H?
I feel like we've videos like this arm native PC gaming is going to really pop off in the next maybe two to three years!!!!!!! Seeing that it is even possible in the first place might really motivate those with the skills to make this more possible and available to the wider masses!!!!! Excellent job on the video, obviously a lot of hard work has gone into it!
This is dope, I once thought about shrinking desktop CPUs to fit in handheld devices and now we have this. Technology is flourishing.
Go check out the insane pricing.
It's insane how well some of these games perform on such a low powered device and not even a full performance! Thanks for the video 👍.
Can't wait until we start seeing retro handhelds using this chip
Yes, but we still need Mainline Linux Kernels.
@@Pridetoons How long to see the first Android based handheld with this soc? Q1 2024?
@@danileo13 we dont know yet, Hoping Retroid Pocket 4 will feature this
Oh, hello. I've seen you a few times.
@@ca9inec0mic58 One can only hope, but I guess we'll get a Helio G99 or sub-dimensity 900 Performace for the RP4
What a fantastic video. The combination of ARM64 and games is daunting enough, but adding in x86, Steam, Wine was completely unexpected. Thanks for working so hard on this!
one of the best, if not the best, rundown on this topic I have seen... thank you, awesome video
Awesome job Taki, can't even imagine the hellhole of research this needed....
Important point in the end of the video, if Valve decided to work with arm based processors, it could do for smartphones and tablets what they are doing for Linux on PC, and it'd be amazing, even more now that arm based SoCs are getting so powerful.
A man can dream, right? xD
This is simply the most interesting prospect of gamming outside of x86 I saw in the last 5 years... I cannot believe companies like valve aren't pushing for this
I mean if the steam deck had an ARM cpu with a decent GPU in it and with some actual money behind it, the cost would be lower the performance might even be better, its like the version of rainbow six siege that they made run on an ARM CPU years ago and it was hitting really high fps. This is something worth funding and would change gaming for the better
@@nolo1337 Yes, exactly that... This would be amazing for handleheld devices and even better "console" like devices to be used in the living rom like nvidia did with the Shield TV it was(kinda of still is) a banger at the time, but was too propriertary and had no PC compatibility whatsoever.
That's because companies are tired of pulling out devs from common game engines that works in one specific os with one specific architecture and one specific api despite how superior cross platform game engines are.
🤣 because Nintendo already does!
@@fltfathin That hypothesis doesn't work because Valve is pushing hard in linux gaming supporting the development of Wine, Proton and other tools. With that being said, it is true that going from Windows x64 to Linux x64 is way easier than going from Windows x64 to Linux ARM64.
The shoddy driver situation is the main blocker right now. Honestly, phones and SBCs alike would perform so much better if SoC makers pushed all their stuff to mainline and contributed to Mesa the way AMD and Intel do. Because of this, the FSFE made an open letter asking for “The universal right to install any software on any device” to legislators in the European Union in 2022 (also, if the memory management issues regarding the amdgpu driver on ARM were resolved, we could get desktop-class GPUs running on these boards, at least the ones with PCIe, and some of those Chinese GPU OEMs that convert laptop AMD and NVIDIA processors to PCIe could find themselves integrating their designs into ARM SBCs, but that's an entirely different beast). The other thing I wish SoC makers exposed from the chips is virtualization support. All modern ARM chips support virtualization, but KVM is broken on everything Qualcomm because they hog EL2 at the bootloader level with random, proprietary black box junk posing as a hypervisor, but at least that situation may change starting with Android 13 devices because Google started asking manufacturers to expose that functionality for Android.
That, and I'm also waiting on Hangover to get polished further. Hangover takes a more direct route to x86 Windows software emulation, meaning less non-native code that needs to go through dynamic recompilation. Potentially better performance.
Man I LOVE seeing clips of those classic games running like WC2+3 and the others.
It was fun geeking out with you sir. Have a great day.
I’ve been waiting for something like this. Really want to pick up a sbc with this chip, hope the drivers will get even better soon
That’s cool, please do more videos like this. Even if it’s a side channel so it doesn’t effect the algorithms
I've been on this same rabbit hole last year on my android phone and gave up, huge respect for pushing through
Dear god, the amount of translations this is running for that performance is insane, is like seing an old skyline barely working held together by duck tape hit 200mph in a drag race, im too lazy to run all those patches myself but for sure some wizard of the linux comunity will release a distro with all of those at some point, if valve put some efort in those arm drivers them we will have some serious Steam Deck competition, RockChip SOCs arent that great so if the an arm distro is launched and people can install them in some SnapDragon device like logitechs or razers them damn those devices will gather a insane amount of value.
Great content as always Taki (y)
Your first time compiling a kernel... Remember that feeling of "oh hell is this gonna work, what am I even doing? This is gonna take how long?" (8 hours later) it worked! (Or) lather rinse repeat till it works
Nothing like that first time...
Pretty soon you'll be rolling out your own kernels with the teeniest optimizations just to see what you can get the slowest SBC you have to do
I swear I had to double read because I saw "kernel compile" and your name starting with J.
Jeff Gearling probably knows a thing or two about this stuff tho :P
2023 is going to be the year of the gaming handheld 🎉
Box86/64, Mesa, and x86toARM translation has gotten really far! Wow!
If this goes far enough I think a platform backer like valve could propel a Proton-like effect for ARM on PCs....though the whole Linux ecosystem has to pull teeth to get the ARM chip makers to cooperate as it is . _.
This might be my favorite Taki video. Box86 and company are one of the more interesting software projects around and game choice was awesome. Loved seeing Gothic 2, Morrowind, Warcraft and Doom 3. So many memories.
Software dev here and I’ve been considering getting into GPU driver work. The only thing keeping me from doing it is that there are teams out there working on panfork for example and it’s still nowhere near where it should be. But anyways. Maybe one day. Amazing work! I really don’t know how you could be this patient.
Respect man that's a huge amount of effort to make a video when the main headache is graphics driver support for arm sbc as there's very little official software for sbc owners for this item .
20:08 Your lips to Gabe's ears. Having been in the Pi Box86 scene some time ago, I wonder if there was a way to get past the login issue using SteamCMD credentials, but a ARM native client would be amazing to play with, especially when Vulkan graphics start to come into their own.
Looking forward to the Steam Deck 4 running through two compatibility layers, one for Widows to Linux and the second for x86 to arm
Thank you so much for doing this. My dream is that Valve makes an ARM steamdeck. With their resources the possibilities would be amazing 🤩.
That was fascinating.
I'm truly blown away. I hope you've rewarded yourself for such an impressive feat.
Oh man! That's absolutely amazing video! You dived deeep into the rabbit hole. Thank you so much for the work you've done!
Good job. I hope to see more videos of steam games running on ARM.
Wow....... thats really crazy man. Gaming is just getting nuts and its exciting seeing it going in all different directions. Especially in todays climate due to high prices ect. Awesome vid and im glad i stumbled onto it. Subbed!
The more information I get about Stenzek the more my respect increases for him
Awww.. the humble Rockchip.
We used to use this little thing a lot for DIY projects and the like.
Look at it now!
VERY impressive !
Wow....
The future will be exciting !
You should write up and share some documentation on the different commands and programs you used to a google doc and share it :)
This video made me feel a bit cozy on how a small device is able to do so much. Wow.
This explains a lot to me about the state of the standalone vr market
The amount of progress ARM chips have gotten over the years is wild to me, I have an ODROID U2 that I barely use now because it's dog slow and struggles with linux for some unknown reason (Probably actually the SD card it's installed on now I think about it) but you have a unit like this that's running games well. Amazing.
One day I'll build a gaming PC the size of a NUC that runs all my childhood games perfectly. I look forward to that day.
Try running Bleach bit on the SD card. its likely bloated with OS crap and your test apps. same as old Windows 98 XP Vista on old slow PCs was wonderful out of the box then degraded over time.
@@joefish6091 I'm going to try this anyway, but it's slow on fresh installs too. I'm notorious for using SD cards I found in phones in the tech bin that don't have a speed rating, could be that too.
damn, we really need an ARM Steam client. We could finally get a cheap handheld for those PS2 - early PS3 era games.
won't happen anytime soon. Box86/64 is still in early stages still can't perform as good as Rosetta2 or Microsofts x86 translation layer
There is a native aarch64 build of Steam, but it's only on macOS.
Odin 2, Here we come!!!!!!!!!!!
I appreciate your chip model, as someone who also has one or two loose Athlon II chips lying around (from Turion and Phenom upgrades).
XD
Awesome video! This is the part of tech youtube that i love so much. Janky windows compatibility layer on top of janky X86 compat layer alongside janky forked GPU driver on top of janky hardware (jank considering how wildly things seemingly vary in the ARM ecosystem with u-boot and devicetrees and other crazy stuff, compared to x86/wintel where you just pop in a boot device and select it with the graphical UEFI setup) running a janky custom built kernel. Jank on top of jank, but it's just lovely especially when things work out in the end. Especially appreciated your persistence in getting steam to work.
I love this and it gives me hope for playing more 3:4 or other squarish aspect older games on arm handhelds in the near future.
Getting Crysis to run feels like the next logical step after Hello World.
Awesome video!
Very exciting stuff! I'm subscribing so I might catch future developments.
This was excellent, it's really shame we do not have proper graphic drivers for this ARM chips, this one is not the only one who suffers from this issue, pretty much every SBC have this problem. Chinese devs does not invest much in software...
This is really cool, it's the closest thing to have steam mobile gaming and I hope steam will support and push arm-pc linux gaming to the masses just like steam deck with linux gaming.
If they did it, it would be an awesome day.
@@TakiUdon infact I think Arm would be ideal for something like the steam deck
Dude, you've absolutely outdone yourself. I thought this would just be a small video. But nooo I was wrong, this is insane! Edit: now getting all of this to run on an arm mobile phone is gunna be cool af. Unfortunately I have the exynos variants of Samsungs note 20 ultra and s22 ultra, but seeing it run on snapdragon will be insane!
Makes me very curious to see what devs could do with such an arm chip if they assigned a team to optimize games for it. Just wow 👌
Thank F. Im not the only one with these issues!!! Thansk for this video big Taki!
ARM has come such a long way. It's amazing to see we've come full circle. This solves a lot of the problems with efficiency and power consumption. Apple was correct to bet on ARM and I hope that software companies start to see the light as well. It would be awesome to see Valve toy with the concept and optimize their Steam Deck concept for the either ARM or RISCV
I like ARM but RISC is the future imo
ARM is RISC
@@armyofninjas9055 ARM is the first risc, Risc-V is just following arms design ideas. While intel and amd are cisc
I have perched and dived into this rabbit hole many, many, many times, and fiddle with these devices in the professional setting for many reasons. Its amazing to see somebody disseminate the complexity of how all these things interact. As to who is responsible for the GPU driver problem, the answer is: nobody. Nobody is responsible. That is the problem. Also, I might be wrong, but you could try logging into steam through steams cli utility to bypass the login screen issues.
This will definitely be of interest to many. You should pick 3 games (1 for box86, 1 for box64 and 1 for wine) and do a step by step tutorial for getting things working. Exagear also seems to be a useful utility to get PC games working.
This is INCREDIBLY cool. It's clear that the hardware made by smaller vendors like RochChip (or basically any android SOC) is very very. Capable. It is just layers of software that is holding it back. Once we establish the proper software ecosystem we will be able to do incredible things with very cheap chips
Curious where did you get the $40 quote for the chip? Ive been having trouble sourcing the chip for a custom SBC project i have lined up. Also use panfrost driver for Vulkan and OpenGL support in linux.
as others allready said the time that you spend to test all the things out i dont want to know. just tweaking to find good workign drivers is allready heave.
HUGE respect!
thanks for this massive overview.
hopefully one day steam will support Aarch64
If someone could build a full OS with all these features out of the box and steamdeck UI that would make this thing a promising cheap retro/indie PC gaming solution!
THANK YOU! I have been waiting for someone to do some box86/box64 testing on this. I genuinely could see this becoming my primary LAN party machine!
Great detail and communication if what is working and what isn't
talking about gaming is great, but I'd love to see what kind of work there could be done in this machine. I guess installing an arm-compatible linux distro with a minimal install and a WM instead of a DE would make this a very usable little machine
I'm loving the technical video. It's very informative
My RK3588s consumes 1.7W at idle in Linux desktop connected to 4K monitor (web browsing).
In Full Load it consumes 8W.
I have 16GB RAM Orange Pi 5.
16GB RAM is great for server purpose after I will upgrade ARM desktop for something more powerful.
BTW this RK3588 chip uses very good ARM Cortex A76 cores:
- A76 has IPC (performance per GHz) similar to Intel Skylake or AMD Ryzen 3000 ..... that's very good.
- A76 has IPC about 2x than Raspberry Pi 4 (using Cortex A72) .... that's huge difference
- A76 was designed as 1st ARM core with desktop performance to fight/beat x86 PC processors
- A76 was released in 2018 and clearly beating AMD Zen1 from 2017 and matching Zen 2 from 2019 (mission acomplished)
How are the later ARM Cortexes?
- Cortex A77 from 2019 was about 15% IPC jump so beating Zen 2 and Intel IceLake
- Cortex X1 from 2020 was up 25% in IPC and was beating Zen 3 at least in 10% IPC
- Cortex X2 from 2021 was mild jump about 10% IPC beating even Intel Alder Lake (using gigantic and power hungry Golden Cove)
- X2 was interesting that it was 1st CPU using new ARMv9 with 2048-bit SVE2 vectors. Also 1st Cortex core 64-bit only (no 32-bit ARMv7 support for old SW)
- Cortex X3 has low 10% IPC jump which beats Intel Raptor Lake and Zen 4 about 10-15% in IPC. Just extending the lead over PC processors.
- X3 is very interesting from RAW performance units: X3 is first CPU having 8 executing units for scalar (general purpose) computation (Zen 4 and Raptor lake have only 5 EU).
- this means that architecture laid by X3 is very advanced in compare to Intel and AMD. So there is solid base for X4 and X5 to bring another 30% IPC uplift. Game over x86, it was nice time but it's time to rest in peace at grave yard of proprietary. Long live open tech ARM and RISC-V.
Thnx
I really wish Rockchip would contribute to open source, or at least give the community the tools to make some open source drivers, I think it would make their products more popular.
That said, I may have to find a RK3588 system to toy around with.
The horrors you've faced, this is why I definitely wait for the experts to work this out before buying a product. Just don't have enough patience for all that headache! It's pretty cool work!
im so glad i found this channel
If Valve could get the overall software and driver situation figured out, an ARM version of the Steam Deck would be a massive game changer, even more disruptive than the original. The most complaints for the Deck by far have been for battery life, which is inescapably pinned to the power hungry nature of x86-64 architecture.
from the gles2 benchmarking software the GLES performance of the Panfrost drivers are ~25-40% OF (not lower than) the binary blob drivers.
I recently got an Orange Pi 5 and have been reading forums etc to figure out whats going on. Not going to speculate here like you say not sure of who or what is to blame.
Its frustrating though that the Gpu drivers as underselling the hardware as much as they currently do.
I'm only 2/3rds into your video and will watch the rest.
Iv'e been trying to look for a way to run SF IV on a board like this maybe I'm hoping for too much but I'll take a look at what you're doing here! :D
Thanks for super cool video!
There is an Android version of SF IV you can use in the meantime, it has controller support (tho you need to use screen to select options etc) - it's the worst version of the game but, it's still amazing
@@anthonypimentel7218
Thanks for the tip! :)
I was thinking of trying the 3DS version with Citra but didn't want to as it looks pretty bad.
Do you know/think the Android version is better than the 3DS version?
Something would be better than nothing! :)
@@anthonypimentel7218
You made me look again and I found a video of someone running through Wine on a Snapdragon Android phone.
It looks pretty good! :)
Video is called, Street Fighter IV (Windows) Android Gameplay | Exagear Emulator Wine 6.0 v3.2
such an interesting video thank you for making this. subscribed!
and of course you had to play HL2 a lot, its goated
Absolutely mad effort! Incredible stuff!
Very cool looks promising for the future of Android and low power arm gaming can't wait to see you future development
what a rollercoaster of a video
Maybe I'm wrong but those Doom 3 stats sounded pretty darn good for that little processor. I remember when that game was new and needed a pretty high end rig to run at high settings.
Didn't know you were so technically capable. Impressive.
Many thanks to showcase BOX86/64. I would add than you can just use goldberg to run most steam games without steam, both windows and linux ones. BOX86/64 makes sense on cheaper SoCs tho, since you can get an x86_64 platform for that price...
I'm a simple man, I see new Taki, I click new Taki
Wow,that’s perseverance! Well done!
I really see the potential of the 3588 chip can do.
Imagine a steam deck lite with arm chip running pc games like the steam deck do. Apple already has the m1 and m2 chips and probably steam investing in this x86_64 layer windows might be in hot waters in the future. That would be a gamechanger fr
I don't think that Apple would share any of their chip. That being said, Snapdragon Oryon that is supposed to release next year is rumored to be comparable to the M series
For real?
Awesome video! I'd love to see this done on an android phone now.
Who knows seeing how well arm chips are doing. It can one day make it in to a mini steam deck.
The performance and power of the RK3588 is the reason why I bought myself a Orange Pi 5 aside from its price. Its Android emulation performance by far has blown me away.
This was entertaining, thank you.
Comparing the performance to an entry level x86 mini PC would be nice. Liliputing reported about Intel N100 based devices starting at around 150$ - thats 10$ more than NanoPi R6S with case, though you need to add storage (but you need that for ARM SBC as well, as built in eMMC isn't that capacious most of the time). I guess that older Ryzen based mini PCs with decent Vega GPUs are still on the market as well.
ARM is very efficient, but entry level low power x86 chips are also way better than they used to be. I suppose that N100 plays original Skyrim just fine, as I was able to run it almost a decade ago on 3317U iGPU. I might be wrong, though.
It might be easier to have an x86 device and tinker when wanting to run google store app than the other way around. But maybe not - I submit an idea for another video here.
Kudos for the incredibly detailed work
Stellar effort, that's dedication!
I remember having to buy a voodoo2 back in the day to play the likes of tomb raider 2. I don't even remember what i had for doom3. Seeing such a tiny cheap chip with low power consumption, running those games well in spite of having no real support for it ... just wow. I hope proper support comes soon. I look forward to run gaming servers with low power consumption. Having ARM cpus being properly supported by more OS's and Applications... would be great.
I think the best you can do is compile Proton/Wine to ARM, just like Wine can be compiled to ARM, and it can work much better than doube emulation (box86/64+wine/proton)
I already knew this!!! I've been saying for months that once we get a Mainline Linux Kernel for RK3588 processors we'll be gaming like kings on ARM processors.
lol I would ask "Why?" but I already know the answer "Because I can." lol good video.
5th taki video about the rk3588? My body is ready
When I got my first rpi, I've thought about this potential, it'd be awesome to run my ancient MMORPG on it, and now it's almost reality, this is so cool.
Go find some mini-ITX Atom PCs or similar, or an AMD SoC mobo, theres plenty of usable mini PCs out there for very little money. they are comparable to ARM PI type units in power.