I was browsing on system76’s offering to see what PCs they have and noticed that they have an ARM Computer that apparently faster than the fastest Apple Mac but for cheaper (Based), but I’m wondering, how well does ARM computers game on linux with proton, it is very expensive to me atm and I can’t afford it, but maybe in the future I could consider it to be my first desktop as I always been using laptops, obviously gaming isn’t like the main priority as I would like a workstation to do heavy work such as blender and stuff and perhaps put gentoo on it in the future (if its supported) but I would like to game on the side when I’m winding down that’s all, so can it game well?
Unfortunately the single core speed of arm chips is not fabulous, that’s what is mainly required for good performance in most games. You’re best off going with a r traditionally supported cpu for now. The revolution will come (and it’ll most likely be RISC).
I think Jeff Geerling made a video trying to game on a similar arm system with mixed results. I’m sure it would work, since you can game on a Raspberry Pi using Box86/64, just probably not too well for the money
I watched his video, but he didn’t cover that in great detail unfortunately, I was wondering if someone already owns one so he can tell me his review about it
512gb of ram you say? That’s legendary 3rd chrome tab territory.
LMAO
Proton for ARM is not (currently) a thing, if that’s a factor
Arm processor, an nVidia graphics card, and Ubuntu? Err, doesn’t sound great.
You’re right…
…put NixOS on dat thang.
I only run arch, btw. 🤣
The Ampre Altra runs from 32 to 128 cores (dear gods that’s beautiful), but with that architecture, and the company’s stated purpose, it makes more sense in a computer meant to be used as a server rather than a desktop gaming rig. You’d use a chip like that in a Kubernetes cluster for example.
Combined with an Nvidia card, a brand notorious for being a Pain In The Ass in Linuxland, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the intended purpose of a box like this is a server for AI/ML-based services.
a freaking love the specs but godddddd…I wish this bloody thing was general purpose, it’ll be so perfect, like imagine this thing compiling gentoo with dwm…maaaaaan
I mean, you can buy it and use it in a general purpose fashion, and yeah, those cores would do wonders for all sorts of compiles. Also, it can be useful if you’re like me and do a lot of Dockerised development. Given that most games are x86 only though, sadly this would be no good :-(
With one of these Altra CPUs (Q64-22), I can compile the Linux kernel (defconfig aarch64 with modules on GCC 15.1) in 3m8s with
-j64. Really great for compiling, and much lower power draw than any x86 system with a comparable core count. Idles at 68W full system power, pulls 130W when all cores are under full load. Pulling out some of my 4 RAM sticks can drive that down a lot more than you’d expect for just RAM. lm_sensors claims the “CPU Power” is 16W and 56W in those two situations.Should be awful for gaming. It’s possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread) suffers a lot. I run a few containers where the performance hit really doesn’t matter through qemu.
Ampere has a weird PCIe bug that results in either outright incompatibility or a video output filled with strange artifacts/distortion for the vast majority of GPUs, with the known good selection that aren’t bugged being only a few select Nvidia ones. I don’t happen to have any of those Nvidia cards but this workstation includes one. Other non-GPU PCIe things like NICs, NVMe, and SAS storage controllers work great, with tons of PCIe lanes.
oh dang, I didn’t know, thank you so much for the info
It should be able to run games that support ARM. That means you are pretty much limited to open source games. The CPU clock speed is fairly low, so don’t expect great performance. These systems are intended for heavily multithreaded workloads.
Yes, but not many games run on ARM natively.
Box64 helps a lot with ARM compatibility, but yes less compatible than a comparable 3.2k gaming PC on x86
At least my game engine, PixelPerfectEngine, is being tested on the Raspberry Pi 400, so a stronger hardware with Linux shouldn’t be an obstacle, but that engine isn’t made for that kind of spectacle if you can decode its name.
you could probably put a decent graphics card in it, but it might be buggy on ARM. and youd have to set up box64 or something, which may still come with its own share of problems. not sure how dxvk proton and the compatibility layers for games work on it either.
ARM is still not quite there yet for gaming. interesting little machine though.
Love it. Want it (but not to game)
Checkout Jeff geerling on YT, I think he did a review on this or something very similar.
he didn’t go indepth unfortunately
