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Comment by dfgfek | Hacker News Reader

I only use Windows because it lets me run x86 binaries. If that's not the case any more why would I use Windows?

What makes you think Windows is dropping support for x86 binaries?

Because instruction set emulation is generally pretty slow.

I haven’t done any objective tests but I frequently run Windows 11 on ARM via Parallels on macOS and - it’s kinda insane (subjectively) how fast it is. Emulated x86 code is pretty fast there as well - I can easily get a solid 60 FPS on some x86 steam games as well.

60 FPS for some steam games, very nice. Now lets see how fast an x86 electron app runs.

I used Discord in Rosetta 2 for a while before there was a proper aarch64 build, it was fine.

Isn't the point of electron to be cross platform? (I get a company may have not released an ARM build or wherever, but seems an odd choice for emulated performance comparison)

Yes, the idea is that it runs equally slow with massive RAM useage independent of platform.

It works surprisingly well for x86 electron apps. It's kind of amazing how fast and bug free it is, in general.

Some steam games? What steam games? Cyberpunk 2077? Starfield?

I don’t have a good list of which games I validated in parallels and which I didn’t (since I’ve stopped gaming for the last 6 months or so).

And I do heavily play boomer shooters so it’s likely I was impressed by performance of less demanding games.

Doom Eternal is one AAA game I definitely would want to play in Parallels but can’t because the Vulkan version is not new enough. I’m confident though that Microsoft could bring these APIs up-to-date on an “ARM PC” though, if it has capable 3D hardware.

GTA V (admittedly not a very modern title anymore) is very playable on Apple Silicon systems, you can find plenty of demo footage on youtube.

It's slower than native, but that hardly seems like a reason for Windows to remove their emulation features entirely.

It works really well on macOS though.

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