this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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The Switch is more than proof enough that pretty much any modern game engine can compile to an ARM target with zero issues (though Nvidia's low level APIs help, not sure about Qualcomm).
But there's zero chance older PC games would ever be updated, and by older I don't mean ancient, some AAA studios stop issuing updates in about one year after release.
So it all comes down to being able to emulate X86 on ARM... The best example we have is Apple, and games run but with a massive performance hit. Microsoft's implementation is borderline unusable. I'm not sure what to expect from Valve.
Checkout Box86/64 and Fex-Emu. They both do x86 translation/emulation on ARM Linux and the results are wayy better than any reasonable expectations I had going in.
A lot of that comes down to Unreal and Unity. They have targets built in for everything. Even a web browser if you want.
I wouldn't say you get that much of a performance hit with Apple games when emulating X86. Rosetta works pretty great for games that are already on macOS but as X86 games. The problem is emulating for Windows games that are also on X86.
It really depends on the game. If the game was truly native, usually the Rosetta performance is good. A lot of games though are JIT, and running a JIT inside a JIT is terrible for performance. The good news is that a game already being JIT is probably easier to patch to be native, for example people have had success replacing the mono runtime used by terraria with a native one and seeing good performance improvements, or running Minecraft on a native JVM. The bad news is it doesn’t necessarily mean the developers will actually update the thing, and mods like this are unlikely to appeal to the vast majority of people.