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SCPH-1000 t1_j5gpcbs wrote

Reply to comment by AnnoyedVelociraptor in Radxa Rock5 Model A is a credit card-sized single-board PC with RK3588S and up to 16GB RAM (starting at $99) by giuliomagnifico

Original Skyrim requirements:

  • Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor.

  • Memory: 2GB System RAM.

  • 6GB Storage

Yeah, think my phone could handle that. Hell, my Watch could nearly handle that.

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Xanthis t1_j5grjga wrote

Dual core x86 is a fair bit different from dual core ARM

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SCPH-1000 t1_j5grxy9 wrote

Maybe, but my phone has a Hexa-core (2x 3.46 GHz Everest + 4x 2.02 GHz Sawtooth) CPU so it’d be smoking that 2 core x86 without breaking a sweat

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Wide-Rooster-751 t1_j5iepiu wrote

Not in Skyrim, which won't use your six cores but will limit you to what ever performance one of your ARM cores provide

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Xanthis t1_j5ipyq2 wrote

Sure your device might have a fair bit of horsepower, but also keep in mind that skyrim isn't capable of using ARM cpus without hardware emulation (currently) which adds SIGNIFICANT overhead. Not only that, but it wouldn't be able to use more than one cpu core. As for which one, your guess is as good as mine.

Also cellphone ARM cpus don't have layer 2 or layer 3 cache, and some don't even have layer 1 cache. This alone is enough to basically negate any possibility of a cellphone running desktop workloads.

You also didn't account for any performance required to actually render things. The cpu on the phone may be capable of the simulation calculations, but it straight up doesn't have the horsepower to do those AND render the simulation.

There's a reason that phone cpus draw 5W at the most and even basic power efficient laptops have a minimum TDP of 15W. A significant amount of that power is going to fetch actions to and from the various caches on the cpu.

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YTP_Mama_Luigi t1_j5irp99 wrote

Everything you just said is completely wrong.

  • Skyrim is on the switch, which is Arm based.

  • Basically every modern SoC has a ton of cache, L1/2/3. The A14 in my phone has 192+128KB L1 per Firestone core, and 8MB L2 shared.

  • “Render the simulation”? This is a video game we’re talking about here, not folding@home. All phones have had some kind of 3D GPU for over a decade now. The ones in flagships now already far exceed 360/PS3.

  • Phones still reach high performance levels despite their power limits.

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Iintl t1_j5ij2eb wrote

The Apple M1 proved that ARM cores can outpace x86 in terms of performance. Not sure why you’d think ARM chips are inherently weaker or less capable of gaming than x86

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Xanthis t1_j5ip72l wrote

The apple M1 is a VERY different beast from the ARM device here. It has a significantly increased number of instruction sets supported, as well as is capable of x86 and amd64 emulation. While you can absolutely run windows 10arm on one of these, you will be significantly limited to what software is designed for ARM.

We deal with the surface Pro X a lot at work, and getting something as simple as a printer driver to work consistently a ROYAL PITA. And those are devices that DO have x86 and AMD64 (Win11) emulation built right in. Running something like as complex physics engine is a total different ballgame. While it most definitely can be done, it requires the cpu to do a huge amount more work because it has to emulate a different architecture since most physics engines don't support ARM in the slightest.

I'm not saying its not possible with any ARM chip, I'm just saying its extremely unlikely with that one. Even if you could get it to run without crashing (good luck, skyrim is crashy on a good day), you would be looking at a sideshow.

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Iintl t1_j5isg6w wrote

There are already many games that run well on Windows 11 VM on M1/M2 (Parallels Desktop). For example the Witcher 3, and funnily enough, Skyrim (1080p medium runs at 60fps reportedly). So that's just not true. In any case, performance issues is not a result of the ARM architecture pre se, but rather the fact that PC games are designed with x86 in mind only. If Skyrim were to be converted to Unreal Engine or Unity, for example, it would run very well on ARM devices.

Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about it, but the Switch literally has Skyrim available. And the Switch is an ARM-based chip with a “mobile” CPU/GPU, with 2015-grade performance. Modern mobile processors like the Apple A16 or Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 easily offer 2~3x the CPU/GPU performance

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Emu1981 t1_j5kgy89 wrote

>Switch literally has Skyrim available.

Skyrim is not a good example for this though. Skyrim had it's ten year anniversary 2 years ago. This means that the "2015-grade performance" is actually 2 generations ahead of what was available when Skyrim released.

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barjam t1_j5jbwsr wrote

Skyrim already runs fine on low end arm devices (Nintendo switch).

The switch at this point is basically the same as an entry level cell phone.

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Emu1981 t1_j5kgg4k wrote

>The Apple M1 proved that ARM cores can outpace x86 in terms of performance.

And a lot of the performance wins are due to the ASICs on the SoC instead of actual core performance. ASICs will always outperform general purpose processors because they are specially designed to do a certain task well instead of doing everything ok.

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