If Microsoft releases an equivalent of Rosetta at the same level of quality it will be a different story. But I can't see what influence Nvidia has over this?
Microsoft has had their own Rosetta equivalent for a few years now. In theory application compatibility is more comprehensive than Rosetta as it supports much older applications, including 32-bit applications. In practice (likely as a result of trying to support so much more stuff) application compatibility isn't as rock solid as Rosetta for every application.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
Microsoft doesn't have access to these instructions for their own implementation (because they are not ARM standard), but theoretically they could have qualcomm or other SoC providers add some custom hardware that does the same. But in a fragmented landscape that can be hard, some windows laptop SoCs might have it, some might not.
And as time goes on, more and more OEMs would probably favor adding the hardware support because people would prefer to buy the ones with faster x86 emulation.
Nvidia is a software company, but i doubt they want to deal with making decades of windows binaries work.
If Microsoft is serious about ARM, there's no reason they couldn't work together to ensure the CPU is optimized for Microsoft's emulation layer.
Isn't Nvidia already doing this with their drivers? Games are notorious for suboptimal or downright incorrect graphics API calls that get patched in the graphics driver on a per-game basis - at least for the AA games in the past.
There is a massive difference between developers just needing to press the "Build" button again (with no code or config changes), and requiring developers to manually add support for both architectures the hard way.
Microsoft is a software company. Nvidia is a hardware company.
Although they don't have the tight integration that Apple has, there might not be the limitations apple adds.
The games that aren't recompiled will (after 2 years or so) fall far enough behind in requirements compared to the state of the art, that the emulation will be fast enough to play those older games.
HOWEVER MS does have an ace -- they can make the next xbox an ARM machine. This will guarantee that all game devs either migrate to ARM or face being on an emulator with reduced capabilities. That will create the needed tech. But it will also help Apple... so MS is likely to try to avoid it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/129jzv4/overwatc...
Starfield should be barely playable if someone manages to get it to run(game requires x86 instructions rosetta doesn't currently support). With M3 around the corner it should be very playable, which falls in line with the 2 year timeline.
They don't write Haskell, Postgres, Rust, Java, Scala, Firefox, Spotify, VS Code, Postico or any number of the other software that I run.
They (Apple) released _their_ software and the necessary tools to make it possible for all the software vendors to port all their code in their time, basically. But it all ran (runs!) on both Intel and ARM, still.