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Someday soon we’ll see some serious Arm gaming Chromebooks. With realistic ray-traced graphics. Rendered on an NVIDIA graphics card. Pinch me, I must be dreaming!
A few months ago our own Gabriel Brangers reported on an official announcement from NVIDIA about combining an Arm processor with an NVIDIA RTX dGPU. It’s probably part of NVIDIA’s overall plan to buy Arm (the company), so the synergy here makes a lot of sense. More details have finally been revealed about this work, including the official developer tools provided for Chromium / Chrome OS, not just for Linux. NVIDIA has explicitly stated that it has SDKs for Chromium OS.
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The TRXDI, NRD, and RTXMU SDKs for Arm with Linux and Chromium are available now. RTXGI and DLSS will be available soon. For more information, contact the NVIDIA Developer Relations team or visit developer.nvidia.com.
via blogs.nvidia.com
A demo was also shown of a ray tracing game being played on Arch Linux using an Arm MediaTek Kompanio 1200 (MT8195) processor and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 dGPU. Wow, that looks good! This is full desktop gaming PC performance on what has always been considered a line of mobile, low-power processors. This processor is a big deal because benchmarks show it has double the performance compared to the latest generation of high-end MediaTek Arm processors. Oh yes, it’s also worth noting that the processor used in the demo is exclusive to Chromebook and Chromebox devices.. We know of at least one Chromebook card in development based on this high-end Arm chip which is codenamed “Cherry.” Adding an NVIDIA dGPU would really be icing on the cake!
Interestingly enough, the new Steam OS 3 that will ship with the new Steam Deck is also based on Arch Linux. Take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, but I’m really wondering if we might see an Arm-based Steam Deck 2.0 in a few years. Google and Valve have clearly had a close collaboration to make Steam support work through Borealis over the past few years. I’d be interested to know how far this collaboration has gone and what steps, if any, have been taken to make Arm-based play together.
Now, let’s go back a second. How does this demo AMD / Intel game work on an Arm processor? This is no small feat and I think there are a few possibilities. First, it could have been built natively for Arm by the developer. It’s very likely for this short demo. Second, he could have used QEMU which can emulate other processors. This is unlikely as there is a huge overload that would make the game slow and it didn’t seem to be the case at all. Third, they could use box86 or box64. This makes the most sense as a long term solution to me as it would open the door to allowing all games to work. box86 and box64 now have 80% of the native performance of running AMD / Intel programs on Arm, and this is the same performance as Rosetta 2 on the new Apple M1 Macs! Impressive!
My friends at Boiling Steam sat down with me earlier this year and we chatted on their podcast about the huge support for upcoming games on Chromebooks. We talked about two related topics: the ability to play with Arm and, separately, upcoming NVIDIA graphics cards. For both, I refused these ideas. Running traditional AMD / Intel applications on Arm is a difficult problem to solve, and NVIDIA drivers on Linux have also been historically complicated due to licensing and installation issues. Apparently Google and NVIDIA have an upcoming game plan to overcome these limitations. I have never been so happy to be wrong!
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