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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Steam Deck
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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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apple silicon has specific changes to amd64, and some extra instructions to help with x86 translation afaik (1 of the main things i think is how memory is laid out is different somehow? so every memory access needs extra clock cycles to accomplish in standard arm64)
but in general, rosetta2 is incredible: very little performance loss… i thiiink it’s something like 2-10%, which is made up for by the cheaper cores
from what i understand, graphics is more of a problem… metal just isn’t well supported - i think the standard thing is you have to do direct x <-> dxvk <-> vulkan <-> moltenvk <-> metal, which is a huge overhead and is far from perfect in its translations
It's down to "memory ordering", as different cores interact with RAM there's rules that govern how those cores see changes made by other cores. ARM systems are "weak", so rely on developers to be explicit about the sharing, while x86's "Total Store Order" is considered "strong" and relies on the hardware to disentangle it all so software can make assumptions and play fast and loose.
You can do software emulation of strong memory ordering on a weak system, but it's slow. What Apple did was provide a hardware implementation of strong ordering in their ARM chips, and Rosetta enables that when running x86 code, so users don't encounter that slowdown.
amazing! thanks for the clarification
I assume the gpu translation issues are Mac specific and not all arm processors?
that’s correct. part of the reason mac doesn’t have the same gaming community as linux with proton does afaik