This Tiny Chip Can Run Steam and Crysis! - Steam PC Gaming on ARM is Awesome
Vložit
- čas přidán 2. 03. 2023
- The ARM processors in our phones are very powerful. What if we could use them to run Steam and PC games? In this video, we look at the surprising performance of Steam running on an ARM processor.
Geek-3588: www.stationpc.com/
Khadas Edge2: www.khadas.com/
NanoPi R6S: www.friendlyelec.com/
Camera: amzn.to/3REWpcj
Join Discord: / discord
Follow me: / takiudon
Disclaimer: This review includes affiliate links. Anything you purchase from those links helps support the channel. - Hry
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 CZcams 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!
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.
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
czcams.com/video/K8IaoIwUJ7k/video.html
Them the "Nintendo Switch Killer" tagline would finally be true
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
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.
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.
Damn, when Doom 3 came out I struggled to run it at 1024x768 on my desktop. This is amazing.
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.
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
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!
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
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
one of the best, if not the best, rundown on this topic I have seen... thank you, awesome video
Oh man! That's absolutely amazing video! You dived deeep into the rabbit hole. Thank you so much for the work you've done!
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?
Absolutely mad effort! Incredible stuff!
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
"It's really powerful there's just no software support" -Literally every single Rockchip SoC ever released.
Kudos for the incredibly detailed work
I'm loving the technical video. It's very informative
This is amazing!!! Great work and great video
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!
Very exciting stuff! I'm subscribing so I might catch future developments.
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
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 👍.
Good job. I hope to see more videos of steam games running on ARM.
Man I LOVE seeing clips of those classic games running like WC2+3 and the others.
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 video Taki ❤
Stellar effort, that's dedication!
Thank F. Im not the only one with these issues!!! Thansk for this video big Taki!
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.
Wow,that’s perseverance! Well done!
Great detail and communication if what is working and what isn't
amazing work!!
I loved this video! Well done.
such an interesting video thank you for making this. subscribed!
and of course you had to play HL2 a lot, its goated
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.
im so glad i found this channel
Excellent work. Respect.
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 .
That was fascinating.
I'm truly blown away. I hope you've rewarded yourself for such an impressive feat.
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.
Nice Work!
You're back! YES!
Huge respect Taki
what a rollercoaster of a video
I've been on this same rabbit hole last year on my android phone and gave up, huge respect for pushing through
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!
This explains a lot to me about the state of the standalone vr market
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.
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)
Hi Taki! This really drives home how important gpu drivers are on all the handhelds.
It always comes down to software
This video made me feel a bit cozy on how a small device is able to do so much. Wow.
very well done, clear, objective and enjoyable to watch. thanks. _o/
2023 is going to be the year of the gaming handheld 🎉
Great work! It really hard to build those image if not know how it build and config correctly. Plus a lot of packages to build and configs.
Youre a monster bro, your explanations are so 😗🤌
Thank you so much for doing this. My dream is that Valve makes an ARM steamdeck. With their resources the possibilities would be amazing 🤩.
This is your best video so far.
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.
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.
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!
5th taki video about the rk3588? My body is ready
Well that was impressive!
Awesome arm hardware software video
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.
Awesome video! I'd love to see this done on an android phone now.
That’s cool, please do more videos like this. Even if it’s a side channel so it doesn’t effect the algorithms
Great video.
Looking forward to the Steam Deck 4 running through two compatibility layers, one for Widows to Linux and the second for x86 to arm
Thats AMAZING !!!!
Very cool looks promising for the future of Android and low power arm gaming can't wait to see you future development
Your explanations were great. Nice video, I really enjoyed the technical aspects and how you covered them. I was definitely entertained and it all got me thinking.
I’ll be subscribing and looking forward to more technical insight. Thanks!
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.
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.
I now feel tempted to try this with ubuntu on nintendo switch vulkan drivers seems pretty stable.
You should write up and share some documentation on the different commands and programs you used to a google doc and share it :)
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
This is seriously impressive.
Very impressive!
Getting Crysis to run feels like the next logical step after Hello World.
Awesome video!
Great content
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 👌
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
I really see the potential of the 3588 chip can do.
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
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.
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.
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
Just on the off chance ... Do you have a step by step guide of how you installed box + pan + fex on the Edge? I'd like to try it on the OP5. No worries if not.
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 . _.
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!
This is awesome!
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!
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
VERY impressive !
Wow....
The future will be exciting !