HN Reader

Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite

It offers native x86, Windows on ARM, and Apple Silicon versions.

I think this is incorrect. Specifically the Windows ARM support. Official hardware support page indicates that the Windows version requires x64. I unfortunately don’t have the hardware to confirm for myself. But Blizzard is the kind of company that would have made a blog post about that.

https://us.support.blizzard.com/en/article/76459

This is neat, and exciting that Windows emulation tooling is progressing! It seems like there’s a lot of work hardware vendors would need to do in order to make Win/Arm viable for game devs. I really wonder if that’s ever going to happen.

9 hours agoby artimaeis

Interesting, I didn't know they'd added an Windows/ARM build. Makes some sense though, WoW has always been one of the best about broad platform/arch support… macOS/PPC and Windows/x86 versions were both available from day one and have stayed in lockstep the whole time, and it was among the first games to make both the PPC → x86 jump and x86 → ARM jump on Macs. Have heard that they had Linux builds internally early on too.

9 hours agoby cosmic_cheese

I’m curious if WoW is using any newer x86 instruction sets like AVX. I’ve been testing some math benchmarks on ARM emulating x64, and saw very little performance improvement with the AVX2+FMA builds, compared to the SSE4.x level. (X64 v2 to v3.) It was unexpected.

It’s the first Windows build with Prism and the first time they’ve introduced AVX(2) support, so I wonder simply if the performance isn’t there yet. I’ve found very little info online about this.

5 hours agoby vintagedave

You should add the newest zones, Dornogal and K'aresh (or Manaforge Omega raid) to the zone list. They are very heavy on graphics.

Besides, I'd look forward to testinf with the nea ARM emulation layer Valve is developing.

3 hours agoby xinayder

I wish ARM wasn't so messy for Linux, with out of date device trees etc.

All I want is something like a Macbook Air, but running Linux - long battery life, acceptable performance, an OS that respects me.

4 hours agoby saubeidl

Does WoW still use Blizzard's in house anti-cheat engine (Warden)? Interesting how the emulated version did not trip this.

5 hours agoby PeterStuer

I'm somewhat surprised that WoW runs on high settings on iGPUs these days.

4 hours agoby KeplerBoy

I'm tentatively excited for the new Snapdragon X2 Elite. Or I would be if any of us could ever afford RAM prices ever again.

The high end model has a 192-bit memory bus, a 3 channel design. 12+6 cores but very big/big more than less big/little. 53MB L3 cache is quite healthy. 80TOps NPU (int8). 9533 MT/s 192-bit memory for 228GB/s which is nipping right at Strix Halo & Nvidia Spark's heels. 12x PCIe 5.0, 4x PCIe 4.0, and "3x USB-C" 40Gb/s (hopefully not some shared bandwidth cop out). And some kind of pretty big GPU. The specs here are quite promising.

And Qualcomm has started taking Linux drivers somewhat more seriously. Linux & mesa drivers are arriving now for previous Snapdragon X Elite & looking pretty promising. That said, this whole Device Tree world is hell, and never going to be good, and Qualcomm direly needs to get religion there & get some ServerReady type ACPI + UEFI compatibility standardized in the products, and stop OEMs from shipping these awful embedded-style non-PC things.

I'm excited to see ARM finally actually show up with something competitive. Alas though, those RAM prices. What a sad buzzkill, and man this is going to take forever to work out.

8 hours agoby jauntywundrkind

The emulated version beats the native version some times. Either the emulator is very good or the ARM build isn't optimized too much.

6 hours agoby DeathArrow

How hard would it be for Blizzard to just recompile WoW to support arm64?

10 hours agoby MuffinFlavored

TL;DR the author attempts to measure the ratio between native and emulated performance using Microsoft Prism on Windows. His measurements suggest that the emulated performance is very close to native performance.

Though I am not skeptical of the authors methodology, I do suspect that the ARM64 build of WoW may not be as "optimized" as the x64 build. This is because in some of his workloads the emulated game actually outperformed the native game.

8 hours agoby geekman7473