In some of our recent videos, we’ve been hammering the point that the entire laptop
industry is already taking steps to replace traditional x86-based chips like the ones
from Intel with low-power ARM and RISC-V based chips in an attempt to compete with Apple’s
excellent M1 MacBooks as well as their upcoming M1X MacBook Pros.
For example, Microsoft announced that they’re gonna be designing their own ARM-based chips
for their servers and Surface PCs like their Surface Laptop 4.
Qualcomm also recently acquired ARM-based chip designer company Nuvia before announcing
plans to design ARM-based chips that can compete with Apple’s M1 Macs.
AMD is also rumored to be working on an ARM-based Apple M1 chip rival with integrated RAM.
Samsung is planning a high-performance ARM-based chip with an AMD GPU for the laptop market.
Nvidia has already announced and showed off an ARM-based gaming laptop with an RTX 3060
GPU running ray tracing!
And even Intel, the creators of x86, are working with SiFive to create 7nm RISC-V based chips
for the laptop market next year.
So it’s quite obvious that ARM-based chips are about to start taking over the laptop
market thanks to the success of Apple’s M1 chip.
But the big question is how these future ARM-based laptops will play modern games, since most
games out there are written for x86 Windows systems, so porting them over to ARM-based
code will be extremely difficult and time consuming.
On top of that, ARM-based chips like Apple’s M1 absolutely do not support the main DRM-level
anti-cheat systems out there, which are required in order to play various online multiplayer
games like call of duty, overwatch, valorant and much more.
So although we were able to actually download some of those games on our M1 Mac under Windows
10 using methods like Parallels 16 and Crossover 20, the games wouldn’t even run at all.
So there is obviously a ton of work that needs to be done before ARM-based laptops can go
mainstream, requiring all of these problems to get fixed in order to have a great gaming
experience.
And that’s where Valve comes into this story, because their Master plan to dominate the
gaming market is also gonna revolutionize gaming on ARM for everybody else, including
Apple and their M-series Macs.
If you’re not familiar with Valve, they basically created some of the most popular
PC game franchises like Half Life, Counter strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead
and Dota 2.
But the real accomplishment is Steam, a game delivery platform which is the world’s largest
distributor of PC games, taking up 75% of the global market share, with 50-70% of the
world’s PC game downloads taking place on Steam.
And for every single game sale, Valve takes a 25-30% cut for themselves, which is why
in 2010, Valve released Steam for macOS, and then in 2013, they released Steam for Linux,
basically in an attempt to control the entire gaming market.
This undoubtedly took a lot of development hours to make happen, and unfortunately, today,
macOS and Linux only account for 5% and 1% of the gaming market share, respectively.
And that’s because Apple hasn’t really been doing much to help MacOS gaming in recent
years, like when they completely dropped support for 32 bit apps and especially when they dropped
support for OpenGL, forcing everyone to use Metal.
So Valve devised a Master Plan that would FIX gaming across all of the gaming platforms
at once, helping them capture as much market share as possible, even in the wake of an
ARM-based laptop revolution that we’re now seeing today.
And that Master Plan begins with Vulkan, which is a low-overhead cross platform open standard
API which is meant to take away the dominance of Microsoft’s proprietary DirectX API,
which is not cross platform at all, only r unning on Windows software.
And since most games are created for Windows using DirectX, this means that Valve’s cross
platform domination goals can’t happen, so Valve took things into their own hands.
In 2014, The Khronos group, the creators of OpenCL and OpenGL, had a meeting with Valve
to kick off a project to create a next-gen Graphics API, which became Vulkan.
Then in 2015, Valve funded LunarG to develop and showcase a Linux driver for Intel which
enabled Vulkan on their integrated graphics.
And over the years, more and more companies started supporting Vulkan in the form of drivers
for the Linux and Windows systems.
Today, AMD supports Vulkan in it’s CPUs and GPUs, Android fully supports Vulkan, Qualcomm
fully supports Vulkan in all of their mobile chips, Nvidia even hosted a Vulkan Developer
day in 2020 to gather support for the API, and even ARM themselves support Vulcan.
On top of that, SiFive’s RISC-V Processors which Intel will be using also support Imagination’s
PowerVR GPU, which is the first fully-featured GPU to support Vulkan.
So based on all of that, it’s pretty clear that the future of gaming on ARM computers
is gonna fully rely on the cross-platform Vulkan API, which conveniently also works
on Windows with x86 chips.
And don’t forget that it was Valve who was doing a lot of the developer work to get Vulkan
on its feet, which kind of makes it seem like Valve actually invented Vulkan, since the
very first meeting on Vulkan’s development was hosted by Valve.
But with all of that said, Vulkan did run into a couple of major issues.
In 2018, Apple refused to support Vulkan, since they want developers to use their own
Metal software, so Khronos ended up bringing Vulkan to macOS and iOS using something called
MoltenVK, which is completely open source.
MoltenVK is a Vulkan to Metal API translation layer for macOS, and it works by automatically
converting SPIR-V shaders to Apple’s Metal Shading Language, basically enabling games
that support the Vulkan API to run on Apple Silicon Macs.
And what’s interesting is that it was actually Valve who worked on creating MoltenVK, since
Khronos directly mentioned them in their press release.
Because of MoltenVK, I was able to play Windows games like Team Fortress 2 and the Witcher
3 on the M1 MacBook Pro by using an app called Crossover to enable DXVK to make the games
run using Vulkan.
On top of that, it was found that two of Valve’s contractors are directly responsible for creating
these translation layers like DXVK, so Valve is already improving MacOS gaming!
MrMacRight on YouTube recently posted a video of 15 games running on an Apple m1 Mac using
MoltenVK, and one of those games is Metro Exodus, which was released on April 14th by
4A games, being available to download straight from the Mac version of Steam.
But according to MrMacRight, 4A games worked directly with Apple’s engineers to port
the game over to macOS, and believe it or not, they did it using MoltenVK to translate
the Vulkan API into the Metal API, all running using Rosetta 2 to translate the x86 code.
So we now have Apple utilizing the MoltenVK translation layer that Valve created to bring
games to the Mac without requiring the developer to rebuild the game to give it native Apple
Silicon support, which is incredible!
And believe it not, there are popular gaming emulators out there like dolphin that run
on m1 Macs, and they run using MoltenVK!!
MrMacRight also showed off other games like Final Fantasy XIV, path of exile, and the
elder scrolls online that all run on macOS thanks to MoltenVK.
The only issue is that performance on M1 Macs isn’t that great just yet since Apple’s
M1 GPU still isn’t that powerful, but as you know, Apple’s M1X Macs are coming in
a couple of months, and we’re expecting GPU performance of up to around 80 to 90,000
points in Geekbench 5’s metal test with the 32-core model, similar to the performance
of an RTX 3060 graphics card that Nvidia recently showed off in their arm gaming laptop.
So yeh, actual AAA gaming is coming to the M1X Macs using methods like Crossover 20,
no longer requiring game developers to rebuild games for Mac, and it’s all thanks to Valve
and their MoltenVK translation layer.
But going even further, Valve is fixing Linux gaming as well.
As you probably already know, Valve recently revealed the Steam Deck, a portable gaming
computer that runs its own SteamOS which is actually built on Linux!
And the problem with that is that many games are made to support Windows, so they simply
won’t work on Linux.
And this brings us back to Valve’s Master Plan that began way back in 2014.
In order for the Steam deck to succeed, Valve needed to create a cross-platform API that
would gain widespread support, since Microsoft’s DirectX only really works on Windows.
So Valve created Vulkan, which is now supported by everything from Android phones to Intel
and AMD chips to Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, to ARM and RISC-V chips and now by macOS using
MoltenVK.
But then the next step in their plan was genius. In 2018, Valve took DXVK and transformed it
into Proton, which is basically a translation layer that allows Windows games to run on
Linux through Steam.
And three years later, we now know why Valve put in all of that effort. The new Steam Deck
absolutely needed Proton in order to play Windows games without them being fully ported
over to Linux, similar to what Valve did with MoltenVK for macOS.
So for the past 8 years, Valve has been basically doing everything they can to make sure that
macOS and Linux have the best gaming support possible to make more revenue from Steam.
And not only that, but the Vulcan API that Valve created is basically required to make
gaming possible on ARM-based laptops, since Windows on ARM is still pretty terrible for
gaming.
And get this, Nvidia recently showed off their ARM-based gaming laptop, and if you look closely,
it was running Linux the entire time, and it was doing it under Vulkan as you can see
in the title, and I can guarantee that it was running using Valve’s Proton for Linux.
But with all of that said, there is still one major issue that needs to be solved.
Multiplayer games that use DRM-level anti-cheat systems will not work at all on ARM-based
laptops, and they don’t support Linux systems as well, which is a major problem for Steam’s
upcoming Steam Deck gaming PC.
But according to the Steam Deck FAQ, Valve is actually working with BattlEye and Easy
Anti cheat, the most popular anti-cheat systems, to get support for Proton ahead of launch,
which should be in December.
This is amazing because prior to this, nobody was able to get these anti-cheat systems to
change their ways, so supporting Proton is gonna be a huge deal.
And since Proton is similar to MoltenVK for macOS, Apple’s ARM-based Macs should finally
get anti-cheat support as well.
And the simple fact that Nvidia is coming out with their own ARM-based gaming laptop
means that those anti-cheat systems will be forced to support ARM, no matter what.
So basically, to sum up this entire video, the future of gaming on ARM is incredibly
bright, and believe it or not, it’s all thanks to Valve’s 8-year Master Plan to
create the open standard Vulkan API, as well as the MoltenVK and Proton translation layers
for macOS and Linux.. and finally, getting the anti-cheat systems to support them, which
is gonna greatly benefit future ARM-based laptops like Apple’s M1X MacBook Pros.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video, and if you learned something new, go ahead and
click that circle above to subscribe for more videos like this one and definitely check
out one of those two videos right over there. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in
the next one!