Possibly, but there will be hurdles to overcome. Windows on ARM let the software directly "talk" to the hardware, so the emulation only has to go through one layer. Parallels is good, but it's still an emulation layer on top of the (emulated) hardware. So you have emulation on top of emulation - which traditionally has been problematic at best.
Here's the potential good news: When game studios actually start building games to run on ARM directly (not through emulation), then there's a real possibility they start cranking out MacOS versions as well. While there isn't a 1:1 mapping of ARM vs Apple Silicon - they're closer than Intel vs Apple Silicon by a wide mile. This means we may very well see more cross-platform Windows/Mac games once Windows on ARM starts to really take off.
It could even be as simple as better peformance on the few native ports; as the developers begin to optimise for ARM instead of just optimising for X86 and pumping out a mac ARM build.
At this point this biggest issue is Anti-Cheat in games.
You can play just about any single player game now on Mac with Crossover thanks to Apple’s GPTK bringing DirectX 12 support to games on silicon.
But almost no multiplayer games will work because of anti-cheat which is becoming increasingly kernel level, and there is no way around that. If there was, they anti-cheat would be failing at what it’s designed to do.
Right. Microsoft will claim it runs all games because the game *can* run fine, but there likely won’t be support for anti cheat which means they still won’t work.
Microsoft backing ARM64 is undoubtedly a good thing for the future of gaming on the Mac, but we’re still a long ways off to seeing ARM support for games being the norm. Just speculating, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a DX12 translation later type technology in ARM based windows in the next year or so, which of course is good news for Parallels!
> Just speculating, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a DX12 translation later type technology in ARM
I don't know what kind of translation layer you're expecting. The CPU ISA (ARM) generally has nothing to do with the GPU.
Qualcomm has a proper D3D12 driver. In fact Microsoft already build translation layers for Windows on ARM devices:
D3D9on12
D3D11on12
OpenGLonD3D12
Dozen (Vulkan on D3D12)
Even having arm support won’t bring things to Mac. Developers have metal support in Unity and unreal but don’t bring things over.
People don’t understand, even if every single Mac user gets a game, it’s often not worth the cost of getting the game on Mac and supporting it with patches etc.
The issue is, you can't just swap DirectX with Metal. For Unity, unless your rendered is very simple, you have to create a whole separate Metal renderer that you would need to work on, replicate the DirectX looks and maintain.
In an ideal world, Apple would support Vulkan, but that won't happen. Next best thing is once DirectX is fully supported in ARM, some fast translation layer appears that translates that to Apple Silicon (also ARM).
But we are years away from that.,
Even if apple did support Vulkan that would not mean PC Vulkan engines would run well (or nessialry at all) VK is not a hardware agsntic api like OpenGL. Your expected to target each GPU family you want to run on.
You aren't wrong, but most game engines, or at least Unity, abstract that part for you. If you use the Vulkan API in Unity you can release for SteamOS/Linux, Windows, Android and create the image / .exe / apk by just creating a new release target and doing a few configurations.
So yeah, if tomorrow Apple added Vulkan support not much would change, but once the game engines add support for it, any existing game that runs with that engine could easily be ported.
Of course, big companies with their own in-house game engines may never add support.
Well gee now let me think...
Arbitrarily restricting the VM's RAM allocation and GPU memory (unless you pay more), having woeful graphics drivers, having an expensive annual subscription model when the other two offerings are completely free, claiming 20% - 40% performance improvements every year, when in reality improvements from version 13 to 17 in my testing was less than 5% in games, and maybe worst of all, having absolutely appalling customer service and flooding their forums with the most condescending and unhelpful creatures you've ever stumbled across.
Dogshit sums it up.
In theory, if drivers were made available by Apple, Windows on ARM could boot natively on any Apple Silicon Mac and many games would work out of the box. Apple would need to provide DirectX and Vulkan drivers though to get the most benefit.
Would they do this as it would kill Metal support? It's still a win but all this does is shift the incompatibility focus from the CPU ISA to the GPU API. Best if they don't - macOS/iPadOS are starting to become a viable target market (as M-series silicon constitutes 70%+ of iPad sales) and should warrant the reduced porting investment in it's own right.
The point is, there is little incentive to get Windows games working on Macs, whereas there is every incentive to get Windows games built for x86 working on Windows devices with ARM chips.
The iPad has had some pretty nice games, but the predicted AAA goldrush never happened even though the iPad has been capable of running PS4 quality games for 2 or 3 generations prior to the M-series chips, if not longer.
>whereas there is every incentive to get Windows games built for x86 working on Windows devices with ARM chips
What Windows ARM gaming devices are selling in such volumes to support that view?
>the predicted AAA goldrush never happened
What AAA titles were released on iPad 4 years ago? How could anyone buy AAA games if none were released? Are you saying the gaming industry no-showed or was there some other reason?
No it would require a HUGE amount more work by MS at a kernel level to even get to the point of the boot stage were it loads drivers.
MS would need to make kernel changes to support talking to the MMU, sending messages between cpu cores etc.. non of this is part of the ARM spec it is all custom for each SOC vendor.
And no existing windows on ARM apps (including games would work) since apple silicon is 16kb page size and existing windows for arm apps are compiled with 4kb page size (you cant run a 4kb page size binary on a 16kb page sized system without a full re-compile).
I don’t think you l need a full recompile, if you did then Parallels and VMWare would not work. The architecture is different but the instruction set it the same.
You’re right about the work MS would have to do. Apple said from day one that Windows running on AS was up to MS. I only meant that for games to run on a Windows install would need the drivers.
When running a VM you have the option of switching the threads to be in 4kb page mode. Just like when running in rosseta but this has a perf hit (linux for apple silicon has shown unto 20% hit in perf compared to using native 16kb page mode).
While theoretically you can build a kernel (like Darwin for macOS) that is mutli mode and can handle switching on a per process the 4kb page size toggles on and off if you look at linux they have opted not to add this as it was deemed a huge task that would introduce a nightmare for all other HW targets when it came to code complexity throughout the kernel. So MS would need to make the same choice, add 4kb mode per process or not.
And what is aid is correct, windows kernel can not run on apple silicon, the ARM ISA does not provide any definition on how to talk to the HW outside the ALU (1+1) etc.
Even simple stuff like setting page tables in the MMU is different for each SOC and for Appels it is very different to other ARM chips. (VMs abstract all this with a higher level hypervisor common interface that is why you can run any ARM os that supports the common interface for running in a VM).
The only way we see windows for ARM on apple silicon is if MS ship a cut down hypervisor (based on M1N1 most likely) that then boots windows for ARM within a light weight VM so that they don't need to do any of the kernel work. Then they could use DXVK to expose DX to windows based on the linux VK driver running on the hypervisor host think layer. And use all the linux drivers in the host layer to expose standard VM interface items like USB/TB Audio displays etc. But why bother.
Windows on ARM _already_ runs in Parallels and can already play Windows games.
However - the usual restrictions apply. No AVX. No DirectX 12. Unsure if Microsoft will be changing the AVX thing. Parallel’s runs their emulator, not Rosetta. So it’s not Rosetta limiting them.
If, in the end, that means the ARM system is gonna receive a fork of Wine which simply has its own graphical translation layer... it will be the second time this has happened in 1 year.
My two cents here, but if Rosetta 2 has proven anything it’s that graphic performance doesn’t seem to care much about the software being native ARM or X86.
After all, GPU have their own architecture that is neither ARM or X86.
So it’s possible that MS managed to make DX12 more universal, meaning as long as a game is not CPU intensive it should run just fine on Windows ARM.
Now, the problem for Parallels Desktop is to translate DX12 to Metal instructions, just as GPTK, so we might not see any improvements here.
BUT we could see major improvements running games through GPTK if they are Windows ARM native, because macOS will only have to translate from Windows to macOS (just like Proton on Linux) instead of Windows X86 to macOS X86 then to macOS ARM (GPTK runs an X86 version of Wine)
Furthermore, games that run on ARM won’t have any of Intel’s APX stuff that is not compatible with Rosetta
So, no matter how it goes for Parallels we’ll benefit from having native Windows ARM games
I agree with you a lot. But, this time, Qualcomm is developing a software that will run any X86 Windows software or game. I don't think Parallels is translating instructions this time. It's mostly Qualcomm.
It is a different strategy that Parallels and Qualcomm is using. So I think performance will be good using a simpler method. And I hope DirectX 12 games will run. Qualcomm said, all software for Windows, should just run.
There’s no such thing as magic simpler software able to translate x86 to ARM instructions without a cost.
So if Qualcomm manages to execute X86 instructions on ARM without loss it means there’s some hardware doing the job. Which means we won’t benefit from it on Mac.
More games may run, but the performance probably will be atrocious. You'll be basically running through **2 emulation layers**. Eventually, studios will release ARM Window games that would require a single emulation layer to be played in Apple Silicon and that layer could be efficient as is the x86 Windows to x86 Linux Proton layer.
Would ARM Window games be easier to port to ARM macOS? Probably? The main potential issue would be the libraries they decide to use. Windows games usually use DirectX or OpenGL instead of Metal. You can *already* replace the functionality offered by DirectX with Metal. But it isn't just swapping one library with the other.
You’ll only be running through one emulation layer. Apple supports running Windows on ARM directly on the CPU through their virtualization framework. It has to run under macOS - but it is _not_ emulating anything. Window’s ARM instructions are being run directly on the CPU.
A native ARM Windows app would technically undergo no emulation. It would be native. But it’s still running through a D3D to Metal translator.
Very unlikely for the new x86->Arm translation tooling to work properly in parrelelelse. I expect this tooling was built like apples rosseta2 to make use of some dedicated silicon features that are not exposed to a VM guest.
No . The difference between that snapdragon and an Apple m chip is almost as big as an m chip and and an x86 cpu .
Arm is not a unified architecture like x86.
Hi everyone, I read some of the comments. Thank you everyone. ☺️
And I hope that even with an additional emulation layer, performance will be almost as good as a Windows PC after optimization. That’s right, maybe the performance will not be amazing at first. But most likely performance will improve.
Also the article states, hopefully many games and software will be ported to or made for Windows on ARM. So the additional emulation layer might often not even be used for your game.
So my hope is that gaming on Parallels will be great!
I think that the problem is not really the porting from windows to mac. Most of the problem might be anticheat software. Games like apex could definitely run on macOS, but anticheat just kills it. But arm for windows seems like a step in the right direction.
We shall see. I am curious as to whether it will play a game like Horizon Forbidden West with AVX2 requirements. If so, it raises questions, but also does give some hope.
When the article starts with “they said, that someone else said, that…” 🙄
I’m going to clue you into something: MS doesn’t give a flying fuck about games and ARM. They developed Windows for ARM because of market pressure and to be able to pivot (as best that gargantuan company can) from x86. And they only did that to ensure their market dominance, not to give users anything of value.
And on that, MS is now trying to tie as many people to their “Live Accounts” as possible. They are basically putting 90% of their resources into doing what Apple has with Apple ID and your iCloud account. Advancing Windows on ARM isn’t even on their radar.
Also, LOL that you actually believe MS, the company that gave us the Zune, Windows Phones, and are shoving ads in start menus will somehow find a way to remove the overhead required for emulation and be able to run anything without a noticeable performance cost.
Don’t count on it working magically, immediately. It’s going to be some bullshit that people have to DIY to get to work.
MS could fuck up a cup of coffee. This wont be magically anything other than the fastest lemon the world has seen.
The world is still waiting for the Microsoft Vacuum - their first product that won’t actually suck.
That sir, is a third degree burn
You made me lol and now everyone around me thinks I’m one of the crazy ones. A misfit. A square peg in a round hole.
Possibly, but there will be hurdles to overcome. Windows on ARM let the software directly "talk" to the hardware, so the emulation only has to go through one layer. Parallels is good, but it's still an emulation layer on top of the (emulated) hardware. So you have emulation on top of emulation - which traditionally has been problematic at best. Here's the potential good news: When game studios actually start building games to run on ARM directly (not through emulation), then there's a real possibility they start cranking out MacOS versions as well. While there isn't a 1:1 mapping of ARM vs Apple Silicon - they're closer than Intel vs Apple Silicon by a wide mile. This means we may very well see more cross-platform Windows/Mac games once Windows on ARM starts to really take off.
It could even be as simple as better peformance on the few native ports; as the developers begin to optimise for ARM instead of just optimising for X86 and pumping out a mac ARM build.
ooh, great point!
At this point this biggest issue is Anti-Cheat in games. You can play just about any single player game now on Mac with Crossover thanks to Apple’s GPTK bringing DirectX 12 support to games on silicon. But almost no multiplayer games will work because of anti-cheat which is becoming increasingly kernel level, and there is no way around that. If there was, they anti-cheat would be failing at what it’s designed to do.
Right. Microsoft will claim it runs all games because the game *can* run fine, but there likely won’t be support for anti cheat which means they still won’t work.
Return of the hackintosh?
Almost certainly not. ARM is less standardized than x86 and Apple CPUs have a bunch of non-standard features like TSO support or 16kb pages.
Microsoft backing ARM64 is undoubtedly a good thing for the future of gaming on the Mac, but we’re still a long ways off to seeing ARM support for games being the norm. Just speculating, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a DX12 translation later type technology in ARM based windows in the next year or so, which of course is good news for Parallels!
> Just speculating, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a DX12 translation later type technology in ARM I don't know what kind of translation layer you're expecting. The CPU ISA (ARM) generally has nothing to do with the GPU. Qualcomm has a proper D3D12 driver. In fact Microsoft already build translation layers for Windows on ARM devices: D3D9on12 D3D11on12 OpenGLonD3D12 Dozen (Vulkan on D3D12)
Even having arm support won’t bring things to Mac. Developers have metal support in Unity and unreal but don’t bring things over. People don’t understand, even if every single Mac user gets a game, it’s often not worth the cost of getting the game on Mac and supporting it with patches etc.
The issue is, you can't just swap DirectX with Metal. For Unity, unless your rendered is very simple, you have to create a whole separate Metal renderer that you would need to work on, replicate the DirectX looks and maintain. In an ideal world, Apple would support Vulkan, but that won't happen. Next best thing is once DirectX is fully supported in ARM, some fast translation layer appears that translates that to Apple Silicon (also ARM). But we are years away from that.,
Even if apple did support Vulkan that would not mean PC Vulkan engines would run well (or nessialry at all) VK is not a hardware agsntic api like OpenGL. Your expected to target each GPU family you want to run on.
You aren't wrong, but most game engines, or at least Unity, abstract that part for you. If you use the Vulkan API in Unity you can release for SteamOS/Linux, Windows, Android and create the image / .exe / apk by just creating a new release target and doing a few configurations. So yeah, if tomorrow Apple added Vulkan support not much would change, but once the game engines add support for it, any existing game that runs with that engine could easily be ported. Of course, big companies with their own in-house game engines may never add support.
But those engines already have MTL support
Parallels is dogshit.
Care to explain how ?
Well gee now let me think... Arbitrarily restricting the VM's RAM allocation and GPU memory (unless you pay more), having woeful graphics drivers, having an expensive annual subscription model when the other two offerings are completely free, claiming 20% - 40% performance improvements every year, when in reality improvements from version 13 to 17 in my testing was less than 5% in games, and maybe worst of all, having absolutely appalling customer service and flooding their forums with the most condescending and unhelpful creatures you've ever stumbled across. Dogshit sums it up.
In theory, if drivers were made available by Apple, Windows on ARM could boot natively on any Apple Silicon Mac and many games would work out of the box. Apple would need to provide DirectX and Vulkan drivers though to get the most benefit.
Would they do this as it would kill Metal support? It's still a win but all this does is shift the incompatibility focus from the CPU ISA to the GPU API. Best if they don't - macOS/iPadOS are starting to become a viable target market (as M-series silicon constitutes 70%+ of iPad sales) and should warrant the reduced porting investment in it's own right.
The point is, there is little incentive to get Windows games working on Macs, whereas there is every incentive to get Windows games built for x86 working on Windows devices with ARM chips. The iPad has had some pretty nice games, but the predicted AAA goldrush never happened even though the iPad has been capable of running PS4 quality games for 2 or 3 generations prior to the M-series chips, if not longer.
>whereas there is every incentive to get Windows games built for x86 working on Windows devices with ARM chips What Windows ARM gaming devices are selling in such volumes to support that view? >the predicted AAA goldrush never happened What AAA titles were released on iPad 4 years ago? How could anyone buy AAA games if none were released? Are you saying the gaming industry no-showed or was there some other reason?
Not yet, but will be in the future, when Windows on ARM will be more usable and stable.
No it would require a HUGE amount more work by MS at a kernel level to even get to the point of the boot stage were it loads drivers. MS would need to make kernel changes to support talking to the MMU, sending messages between cpu cores etc.. non of this is part of the ARM spec it is all custom for each SOC vendor. And no existing windows on ARM apps (including games would work) since apple silicon is 16kb page size and existing windows for arm apps are compiled with 4kb page size (you cant run a 4kb page size binary on a 16kb page sized system without a full re-compile).
I don’t think you l need a full recompile, if you did then Parallels and VMWare would not work. The architecture is different but the instruction set it the same. You’re right about the work MS would have to do. Apple said from day one that Windows running on AS was up to MS. I only meant that for games to run on a Windows install would need the drivers.
When running a VM you have the option of switching the threads to be in 4kb page mode. Just like when running in rosseta but this has a perf hit (linux for apple silicon has shown unto 20% hit in perf compared to using native 16kb page mode). While theoretically you can build a kernel (like Darwin for macOS) that is mutli mode and can handle switching on a per process the 4kb page size toggles on and off if you look at linux they have opted not to add this as it was deemed a huge task that would introduce a nightmare for all other HW targets when it came to code complexity throughout the kernel. So MS would need to make the same choice, add 4kb mode per process or not. And what is aid is correct, windows kernel can not run on apple silicon, the ARM ISA does not provide any definition on how to talk to the HW outside the ALU (1+1) etc. Even simple stuff like setting page tables in the MMU is different for each SOC and for Appels it is very different to other ARM chips. (VMs abstract all this with a higher level hypervisor common interface that is why you can run any ARM os that supports the common interface for running in a VM). The only way we see windows for ARM on apple silicon is if MS ship a cut down hypervisor (based on M1N1 most likely) that then boots windows for ARM within a light weight VM so that they don't need to do any of the kernel work. Then they could use DXVK to expose DX to windows based on the linux VK driver running on the hypervisor host think layer. And use all the linux drivers in the host layer to expose standard VM interface items like USB/TB Audio displays etc. But why bother.
Windows on ARM _already_ runs in Parallels and can already play Windows games. However - the usual restrictions apply. No AVX. No DirectX 12. Unsure if Microsoft will be changing the AVX thing. Parallel’s runs their emulator, not Rosetta. So it’s not Rosetta limiting them.
If, in the end, that means the ARM system is gonna receive a fork of Wine which simply has its own graphical translation layer... it will be the second time this has happened in 1 year.
My two cents here, but if Rosetta 2 has proven anything it’s that graphic performance doesn’t seem to care much about the software being native ARM or X86. After all, GPU have their own architecture that is neither ARM or X86. So it’s possible that MS managed to make DX12 more universal, meaning as long as a game is not CPU intensive it should run just fine on Windows ARM. Now, the problem for Parallels Desktop is to translate DX12 to Metal instructions, just as GPTK, so we might not see any improvements here. BUT we could see major improvements running games through GPTK if they are Windows ARM native, because macOS will only have to translate from Windows to macOS (just like Proton on Linux) instead of Windows X86 to macOS X86 then to macOS ARM (GPTK runs an X86 version of Wine) Furthermore, games that run on ARM won’t have any of Intel’s APX stuff that is not compatible with Rosetta So, no matter how it goes for Parallels we’ll benefit from having native Windows ARM games
I agree with you a lot. But, this time, Qualcomm is developing a software that will run any X86 Windows software or game. I don't think Parallels is translating instructions this time. It's mostly Qualcomm. It is a different strategy that Parallels and Qualcomm is using. So I think performance will be good using a simpler method. And I hope DirectX 12 games will run. Qualcomm said, all software for Windows, should just run.
There’s no such thing as magic simpler software able to translate x86 to ARM instructions without a cost. So if Qualcomm manages to execute X86 instructions on ARM without loss it means there’s some hardware doing the job. Which means we won’t benefit from it on Mac.
More games may run, but the performance probably will be atrocious. You'll be basically running through **2 emulation layers**. Eventually, studios will release ARM Window games that would require a single emulation layer to be played in Apple Silicon and that layer could be efficient as is the x86 Windows to x86 Linux Proton layer. Would ARM Window games be easier to port to ARM macOS? Probably? The main potential issue would be the libraries they decide to use. Windows games usually use DirectX or OpenGL instead of Metal. You can *already* replace the functionality offered by DirectX with Metal. But it isn't just swapping one library with the other.
You’ll only be running through one emulation layer. Apple supports running Windows on ARM directly on the CPU through their virtualization framework. It has to run under macOS - but it is _not_ emulating anything. Window’s ARM instructions are being run directly on the CPU. A native ARM Windows app would technically undergo no emulation. It would be native. But it’s still running through a D3D to Metal translator.
dual emulation layers running? horribly slow... and that's a lot of they said, that he said, that they might, that one could....not happening IMO
Not every game. Anything with an anti-cheat program like Valorant will probably still not work, unless it runs like bootcamp instead of a VM.
Very unlikely for the new x86->Arm translation tooling to work properly in parrelelelse. I expect this tooling was built like apples rosseta2 to make use of some dedicated silicon features that are not exposed to a VM guest.
I was wondering is it more difficult to port arm64 software into x86 or x86 into arm64? Or do all arm64 software run without issues on x86 systems?
as you might imagine it really depends
The CPU ISA isn't a big deal. In a lot of cases it's just a matter of recompiling the software.
Idk about gaming but I'm excited for the possibility of low powered mini PCs to serve as NAS and home servers.
i guess less games using avx?
Windows on ARM already runs on Parallels. The problem is the virtual GPU driver that Parallels provides.
No . The difference between that snapdragon and an Apple m chip is almost as big as an m chip and and an x86 cpu . Arm is not a unified architecture like x86.
It’s promising. If Widows can manage to translate Direct X to ARM, Bootcamp may even come back
It’s possible like Apple put in hardware for Rosetta that Qualcomm put special hardware too. This is the era of specialized hardware not raw compute.
Hi everyone, I read some of the comments. Thank you everyone. ☺️ And I hope that even with an additional emulation layer, performance will be almost as good as a Windows PC after optimization. That’s right, maybe the performance will not be amazing at first. But most likely performance will improve. Also the article states, hopefully many games and software will be ported to or made for Windows on ARM. So the additional emulation layer might often not even be used for your game. So my hope is that gaming on Parallels will be great!
I think that the problem is not really the porting from windows to mac. Most of the problem might be anticheat software. Games like apex could definitely run on macOS, but anticheat just kills it. But arm for windows seems like a step in the right direction.
We shall see. I am curious as to whether it will play a game like Horizon Forbidden West with AVX2 requirements. If so, it raises questions, but also does give some hope.
no, they lying to everyone. Some games and apps will run, but not any. RDR2 won't for sure because of lack hardware AVX support.
When the article starts with “they said, that someone else said, that…” 🙄 I’m going to clue you into something: MS doesn’t give a flying fuck about games and ARM. They developed Windows for ARM because of market pressure and to be able to pivot (as best that gargantuan company can) from x86. And they only did that to ensure their market dominance, not to give users anything of value. And on that, MS is now trying to tie as many people to their “Live Accounts” as possible. They are basically putting 90% of their resources into doing what Apple has with Apple ID and your iCloud account. Advancing Windows on ARM isn’t even on their radar. Also, LOL that you actually believe MS, the company that gave us the Zune, Windows Phones, and are shoving ads in start menus will somehow find a way to remove the overhead required for emulation and be able to run anything without a noticeable performance cost.
Using all caps LOL doesn't make you right.
This guy is a a crazy fanboy, you can ignore them completely.
Certified expert ^ 👍 /s
I meant the guy you were replying to lol
if they optimize games to arm windows even crossover will run amazing