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

Posted by geekman7473 1 day ago

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Comment by artimaeis 1 day ago

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.

Comment by AndrewDavis 1 day ago

> 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.

It has been around for a while, circa 2021. They made a forum post when they released it.

For reasons unknown the link no longer works but here it is on the wayback machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20210512205620/https://us.forums...

Comment by mahmoudimus 1 day ago

Windows ARM builds are available on their CDN.

Comment by vintagedave 1 day ago

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.

Comment by cosmic_cheese 1 day ago

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.

Comment by eptcyka 1 day ago

Wine has almost always worked, back when I played.

Comment by CursedSilicon 21 hours ago

There was a native Linux client available when the game was still in alpha. Circa 2002/2003

Blizzard leans heavily on making sure their software is portable!

Comment by cykros 22 hours ago

I recall seeing that it ran better on wine than on windows on the same hardware.

Never tested myself as I'm more a runescape/ragnarok online sorta guy myself...

Comment by saubeidl 1 day ago

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.

Comment by jsiepkes 1 day ago

This is also why I don't get why people are so enthusiastic about ARM. While there is nothing technically preventing manufacturers from using extensible standards and technologies like ACPI, UEFI, etc. with ARM, pretty much no one does. Meaning these devices are closed and pretty unusable with Linux.

Comment by wkat4242 1 day ago

Linux had the chance to fight against what GNU called "TiVoisation" but Linus said TiVo did nothing wrong.

So now we have a world full of devices running open software but which are locked down. And a Linux foundation run by corporates.

To me it is clear this was indeed a huge problem. Linux might not have become as big as it is now if it had taken GPL3 on board but it would have made it a lot harder for manufacturers to do what they're doing.

Comment by brianwawok 23 hours ago

So they took gpl3, and manufactures all licensed windows. Does this help Linux or FOSS?

Comment by wkat4242 5 hours ago

No the Linux kernel didn't move to gpl3 for this reason.

It should have, IMO. Because now we're stuck with all these locked devices. Even PCs are becoming more locked now. FOSS (at least on the OS level) can't really exist without open devices to run it on. Otherwise you're dependent on the gatekeepers of big tech and there's nothing 'free' about it anymore then.

Comment by pezezin 1 day ago

I strongly agree with you. My little experience tinkering with ARM-based systems has been frustrating, I don't want to touch ARM ever again until it has some kind of standard boot process. Same for RISC-V.

Comment by sumtechguy 1 day ago

ARM does not have a 'ibm pc clone' moment. There is no one, that anyone wants to rally behind. The market is fragmented in an interesting way but a way that is hard for people to target. This fragmentation has existed since the start of microprocessor was started. There were hundreds of different x86, 6502, SH, MIPS, ARM style computers as well. Even the 'ibm pc' was even one of them, but everyone just kinda said 'that one'. All of those standards you said exist in some ARM boards. It is a really mixed bag. Out of all of the ARM systems RasberryPI came closest to a standard.

QCOM in this case probably could make a standard ARM PC. The problem will be QCOM corporate structure will probably strangle it. They will want to create a patent license stream. The interesting bits would be behind NDAs. It is their bread and butter.

The reality is no one wants to be IBM in the IBM/PC clone market. Basically the ones who did the expensive work to make the board but everyone just copies it.

Comment by jeroenhd 1 day ago

ARM support is still mediocre, but it's improving with the new Snapdragons. Every generation seems to make running normal Linux on those things a little bit less of a pain.

Funnily enough, the device with probably the best "normal" desktop protocol support is the old Windows RT tablet, which features an ARM SoC that runs UEFI and ACPI and everything. It's locked down to Microsoft's secure boot keys, unfortunately, but thanks to Microsoft abandoning the device, there are exploits you can use to bypass that.

Comment by kcb 23 hours ago

The Thinkpad x13s is pretty good for a mostly normal arm Linux laptop. The SOC is still pretty usable and it's functionality on Linux is also pretty complete. The main thing lacking is the speakers are very low to protect them from blowing out without a proper driver.

Comment by vbezhenar 15 hours ago

x86 laptops are shipping with buggy firmware. It's easier to update device tree than to patch firmware. The less work delegated to hardware manufacturer - the better, if you ask me. Just give me PCB and datasheets.

Comment by fylo 1 day ago

Asahi remix?

Comment by philistine 1 day ago

I have an M5 MacBook Pro. I’ll presume I’ll be able to run Asahi on it once I’m ready to switch.

It’s not their fault per se, but it’s discouraging.

Comment by saubeidl 1 day ago

It's... okay. No USB-C display support is a dealbreaker for me.

Comment by xinayder 1 day ago

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.

Comment by PeterStuer 1 day ago

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

Comment by ohnoesjmr 1 day ago

The anti-cheat streams executable code into the client, and that code is mostly for detecting tampering with the game, injected modules, etc.

Not sure they care about it running in an emulated environment.

They do effectively allocate an executable memory region, copy the machine code that was streamed into it, and jump to it.

I guess in this case the emulation is an actual vm, rather than "rewrite x86 instructions into arm" (don't know much about this subject, but assumed that was how rosetta worked)

Comment by mort96 1 day ago

Rosetta 2 rewrites x86 instructions into ARM, but it does this on the fly for generated instructions too. When you put x86 machine code into a buffer and then jump to execute it, Rosetta 2 dynamically translates those generated instructions into arm before executing them.

At least that's what I gathered around the time it was released. It seems to hold up; JITed x86 applications work great under Rosetta 2.

Comment by vbezhenar 15 hours ago

In my experience they don't work great. JVM straight up crashed when Rosetta 2 was released and few years later it worked but with huge performance drop. Better than nothing, for sure.

Comment by Thaxll 1 day ago

It's a userspace anti cheat so it's not a problem.

Comment by ktallett 1 day ago

I didn't know it did for quite a while. I have regularly emulated WoW on Linux since 2013 and not had any significant issues.

Comment by vbezhenar 15 hours ago

WoW anti-cheat is very weak. Bots are using fly-hacks, and nobody cares for weeks.

Comment by jauntywundrkind 1 day ago

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.

Comment by arjie 1 day ago

I have always had trouble acquiring the actual devices at a competitive price. It is cheaper to get an M-series Mac Mini than a Snapdragon X Elite box and the former smokes the latter. The one advantage of the non-Macs is usually that their Linux support is good, but the Ideacentres or whatever that ship the S X E don't have very much support. Despite being fairly eager to try out this device, I could not bring myself to spend the money on what would remain in the closet after I failed to boot a Linux, any Linux.

Comment by KeplerBoy 1 day ago

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

Comment by jajuuka 22 hours ago

How well it runs scales with how new the content is. They illustrated this in the article, but they didn't test the current expansion content and high traffic areas. I imagine main hubs like Dornogal or the current raid tier will require dropping the graphics very low to not have a slide show. Bumping up the resolution has a significant impact as well.

Comment by rkpiotr 20 hours ago

With player hubs, it's always a stutter, but it also depends on the network connection - you can have someone with the best rig showing 10 FPS and someone on a laptop with 30-40 FPS at the same time.

Mass mobs combat in Karazhan is a pretty good raid tester - in raids, the FPS won't be as low as that (AVG), but the 1%/0.1% lows will be quite close. For systems with weaker and weaker CPUs, even the AVG FPS will come closer and closer as the game will get a single-core "world state" bottleneck more easily. I did some comparison benchmarks before for this, including a world boss world quest with lots of people ;)

Also, regressions in WoW are a nightmare to handle. You go to the latest raid, the FPS is fine, but someone next to you has a slideshow.

Comment by jajuuka 22 hours ago

I've been very curious about this since they added Windows on ARM support. Admittedly there hasn't been a really performant SoC to see how it stacks up to Apple Silicon. The Apple Silicon version runs so well I had hoped they brought that same performance jump to Windows on ARM. One thing I noticed about the Apple Silicon version was that it loads the game world significantly faster than x86. Even with lots of heavy addons. I'm curious if that mirrors to Windows ARM.

Also curious if Battle.net client has the same bug as Apple Silicon where it consistently needs to run a game "update" after closing the game. The client is still x86 even on macOS so I'm wondering if this is an translation issue that could be fixed with a proper native client.

Comment by DeathArrow 1 day ago

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

Comment by geekman7473 1 day ago

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.

Comment by fleroviumna 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by MuffinFlavored 1 day ago

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

Comment by wyldfire 1 day ago

As others have said in this thread, they did.

But to answer your question as if they had not yet: it's never "just" recompiling. It's:

* recompile (and fix any warnings/errors indicated by the compiler)

* re-test ... the entire game

* fix the bugs that are encountered in test

* release/publish the game for Windows ARM64

Whatever this effort is, it's much much more than "just" recompiling. You could imagine motivated individuals on the engineering team chipping away at this list of their own accord. But following through with a product requires significant effort and coordination that often is weighed against the potential revenue that this new market could provide.

Comment by mort96 1 day ago

A really fun thing is that arm and x86 have different char signedness: char is signed on x86, unsigned on arm. This has tripped me up more than a few times when I try to compile software that's only been tested on x86 for an arm machine.

Now WoW already supports Apple Silicon on macOS so most of that was already taken care of, but I'm betting there's a lot of Windows-specific code in there too.

Comment by pdpi 1 day ago

They've supported macOS through all of PowerPC, Intel, and now ARM. I'm sure Windows on ARM should be trivial for them.

Comment by mort96 1 day ago

They did the work your parent comment describes for macOS on PowerPC, macOS on Intel, and macOS on arm. They can do the work, but it's still work.

Comment by jajuuka 22 hours ago

I think it also depends on urgency. When Apple unveiled Intel and Apple Silicon they were very clearly the future of the platforms with large buy in from day 1. Blizzard seems to have a good relationship with Apple since they released the Apple Silicon version of WoW almost the day the first laptops started shipping to customers.

Windows on ARM isn't really the same ballpark. They were still there early, but the platform is still changing quite a bit.

Comment by MangoToupe 1 day ago

> * re-test ... the entire game

That seems a bit absurd. Surely many parts of the game won't likely have bits of code that interact with architecture in unique ways. Especially if you wrote the game in relatively portable code to begin with (as WoW almost certainly was).

I mean idk, maybe windows arm64 is a uniquely nasty target. But i'm skeptical.

Comment by kergonath 1 day ago

> Surely many parts of the game won't likely have bits of code that interact with architecture in unique ways.

I came across a performance-killing bug that made the game unplayable (less than 1fps on a Mac Studio). It happened in a couple of dungeons (I spotted 2). From my tests it was caused by a specific texture in the field of view at a certain distance. There was no problem on Intel Macs, AFAICT. My old MBP was terrible but did not get any performance hit.

This is what can happen any time you don’t test even a tiny corner of the game. Also, bear in mind that this depends on graphics settings and you get a nightmare of a test matrix.

Comment by MangoToupe 20 hours ago

> From my tests it was caused by a specific texture in the field of view at a certain distance.

Surely that's a GPU thing and not an CPU thing, yea? Or was something about the texture processing architecture-dependent?

Comment by kergonath 18 hours ago

On a Mac Studio it’s kind of the same thing. It’s the GPU core that was in all M1 chips. I could not reproduce it with AMD GPUs, but I also did not try very hard. I remember being annoyed because I always needed to remember to look away when we were doing these instances otherwise we’d fail it because of the time it took to get out of it.

The core issue is that something slipped through the cracks. I don’t blame them, it’s a huge game and testing takes quite a lot of time. But testing does matter.

Comment by jama211 1 day ago

I mean you can release it with loads of parts untested and just _hope_ there aren’t bugs there, it’s definitely an option. It’s risk vs reward there.

Comment by mobilio 1 day ago

few days ago there was thread here about Valve and 20 years FPU bug...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009962

WoW was released 21 years ago AFAIK

Comment by Wowfunhappy 1 day ago

…the thing is, this is the type of bug I could also imagine happening under emulation. Or just following an OS update.

Comment by jama211 20 hours ago

That was a fantastic read, thank you for this

Comment by dgellow 1 day ago

now I feel old...

Comment by teraflop 1 day ago

They did, and that's what this article is benchmarking.

Specifically, it's comparing the native ARM64 version against the emulated x86_64 version, both running on an ARM64 CPU.

Comment by pxc 1 day ago

It seems that "native vs. emulated" here means "arm64 binaries vs. x86 binaries, both running on Windows". So the comparison that the OP is making wouldn't be possible if Blizzard didn't already support aarch64.

Comment by vbezhenar 1 day ago

They support arm64