Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

Lots of comments are expressing skepticism about compatibility but it's pretty cool how Nvidia has the clout to convince a bunch of game publishers and creative apps to release Arm versions. Popular games like League of Legends as well as stuff like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere are getting native Arm ports.

> Over 100 Windows software providers such as Adobe, Blackmagic Design, Blender, CapCut, ComfyUI and OTOY, and game developers such as KRAFTON, NetEase, Remedy Entertainment, Riot Games and XBOX are embracing the new RTX Spark platform. [...] NVIDIA is partnering with Adobe to rearchitect Adobe Premiere and Photoshop for RTX Spark. [0]

> Gaming on Arm is finally coming of age thanks to the NVIDIA partnership. Native anti-cheat solutions from Epic and BattlEye are fully supported on the RTX Spark platform. Major developers are jumping on board, with Riot Games bringing League of Legends and Valorant natively to the architecture, alongside KRAFTON bringing PUBG Battlegrounds. [1]

Also, Nintento Switch is an Nvidia/Arm gaming device so many game publishers already have some experience with the combo.

[0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-windows-...

[1] https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/01/microsoft-builds-it...

Quite a few of those already have arm ports for windows, and have since the 1st gen Snapdragon X Elite. I have the surface laptop 7 with that chip, and I remember it being made a big deal when photoshop & lightroom were ported. I believe Blender also had an arm build for windows a while ago too as did Davinci Resolve (as of 2024 I believe).

The big news is more so on the games side, which is probably where Nvidia had some pull.

I'm curious what "rearchitect for RTS Spark" means in practice though. Sounds like its less convincing them to make an arm build for windows, but they are maybe taking advantage of some hardware specific features? If so, what does that mean for the Snapdragon X series I wonder?

Press releases are easy. Delivering on promises, not so much.

This thread is almost 1:1 identical to when Apple released their own silicon. This has the potential to be a worthy competitor for the Windows ecosystem, precisely because of NVidia’s moat as the grandparent pointed out.

Microsoft pulls in their weight as well, so this seems like it has a decent chance of getting industry support.

Yes, there is a chance but it could also turn into another Itanium. Just because it is a superior product and backed by giants, doesn't necessarily guarantee success.

Not sure how it's comparable to Itanium at all? ARM is not a new architecture. It's not even a new architecture for Windows.

Itanium was arguably not superior. The assumption behind it (that the compiler can bring order to the chaos) was wrong, making it slower, more expensive, and less efficient than x86 in real-world scenarios.

That said, Apple still deserves a lot of credit. They had a 5+ year edge, especially around the vision of tightly integrating the NPU and unified memory.

Like gaming consoles they calculated that unified memory will be cheaper for them in the long run. The funny thing is that while it gave them a unintended edge on local A.I, the "cheaper" calculation, didn't work out so well for them.

In what way hasn't it worked out for Apple? Some of their products are totally sold out.

They are limiting sku's on everything but highest end. The ramocalips is hitting high end RAM, especially hard.

Even on the highest end, the M3 Ultra at 512gb RAM doesn't exist anymore :'(

Actually, I went to the Mac Studio configure page on Apple.com and you can't do higher than 96GB now...

I think they have a longer lead, considering how long they’ve been making iPhone A-style processors. Migrating the desktop ecosystem to it was only the logical next step.

If you can get desktop RTX 5070 performance, oodles of (v)RAM, and minimal power usage out of a thin and light mobile device it's a win. This is change. If you can afford it.

Yeah but like, Apple put Rosetta 2 out and it was damn good.

Vendors didn’t have to do shit to support the platform, they just got better performance if they did (like factorio).

There is something of a difference between “all your stuff will still work, at comparable performance” and arm windows which (as evidenced by all the vendor promises) you can’t really currently say with prism.

I would describe prism as “surprisingly rubbish considering they had an example of how to do it right” and “your app probably doesn’t run because of drivers or some ??? compatibility thing”.

Am I misremembering? I remember being blown away by Rosetta.

Prism… yeah. Toggle the settings. Disable jit. Disable FP. …bin laptop. Get an intel laptop.

I think a lot of it is down to Windows, not Prism itself.

For decades, Windows made it too easy for games and even some application to install drivers. Windows games use drivers for anti-cheat (and historically for copy protection too). Neither Apple Rosetta nor Microsoft Prism can translate/emulate drivers, but since drivers have been much more prevalent on Windows, now Windows has a much biggest compatibility problem.

Don't read too much into the marketing speak. "Embracing" does not necessarily mean most of these companies are actually doing anything other than providing a marketing statement about how their product already works on ARM64 Windows. E.g. Photoshop has had an ARM64 version on Windows since 2020, EAC & BattlEye since 2024 & 2025 respectively. And, even then, it'd be a lot more exciting if e.g. Fortnite would actually enable ARM64 support in EAC rather than it just be supported by EAC.

Only the ones which explicitly list something like the Riot Games mention are really related to the device/Nvidia. The thing which really pushes this along is user adoption/market share, not big names. This device will help that, especially in the gaming space, but it's easy to get over eager as it being from Nvidia means everyone else who has been waiting will just now jump on board too because of that.

You know most of them already have arm versions...

Will this push even more games into Linux?

Most games are Windows games running on Proton.

What would push more games would be Valve actually making it worthwhile to natively target Linux.

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor at all and I'm willing to bet most of the engineers working on game engines have ported them to linux/arm for fun already, they just can't release for various reasons above.

So if anything, we need to push more game studios to use open source dependencies which will make porting easier.

Linux is terrible on ARM, I don't agree that it runs perfectly fine at all. Try loading Ubuntu onto a Snapdragon laptop for example. It works but lots of issues eg sound, webcam quality, etc

Those are specific firmwares for those devices that are either closed-source binary blobs, open-source hackjobs/reverse engineered attempts, or just plain missing firmwares. The fault is not on Linux but rather on Qualcomm not releasing things for that specific SoC. Some SoC's have better support than others. ARM cpu's themselves works perfectly fine on linux.

Intel has closed things down: some wifi and webcam firmwares are poop and a massive pain to get working on newer chips (if at all). Their wifi firmwares also don't respect certain kernel overrides (which is why I replaced my Intel Wifi 7 chip with a mediatek Wifi 6 one). Blame is 100% on intel and not linux. Broadcom is also pretty bad at being a team player in this regard.

I basically recommend everyone to stick with AMD chipset & GPU's where possible, because they have mainline kernel support nailed down 95% of the time.

Again, ARM works fine, their extra firmwares for extra devices on SoC's are to blame if you struggle.

> Those are specific firmwares for those devices that are either closed-source binary blobs, open-source hackjobs/reverse engineered attempts, or just plain missing firmwares

This isn't fully the reason, Linux is infamous for requiring a specific build for each SoC (and usually each board of said SoC) where as Windows on ARM uses ACPI which Linux doesn't support to the same level. Linux prefers the landfill promoting device tree for each device approach.

> Linux is infamous for requiring a specific build for each SoC

no, thats just androids problem. desktop linux like ubuntu ships all the device trees from their supported arm variants. its still more work than acpi for kernel maintainers but you dont need device specific builds.

> landfill promoting device tree for each device

whats landfill promoting about this? you dont need to keep the trees updated they only depend on the hardware and follow a stable spec. and even if the vendors dont want to support linux a community user can write their own device tree and send upstream.

Webcam firmware & colour grading & programming is a black art btw.

GNU/Linux has trouble, but thanks to Android (and ChromeOS), we know Linux itself specifically on ARM does actually work. Freeing those drivers is another matter, unfortunately.

I think you're referring to a specific SoC that's used on recent laptops which happens to have driver issues, something not specific to ARM at all. Other (usually embedded) ARM devices have been running just fine on Linux for over 20 years now.

So given how ARM has favored closed-ended boxes like the Switch, how is this any different than a Switch with a keyboard and Windows RT?

Somewhere, a monkey’s paw must have curled its finger.

Apple and Steam have been successfully applying pressure for years. Who's willfully staying behind at this point?

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