I think Jeff Geerling made a video trying to game on a similar arm system with mixed results. I'm sure it would work, since you can game on a Raspberry Pi using Box86/64, just probably not too well for the money
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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I watched his video, but he didn't cover that in great detail unfortunately, I was wondering if someone already owns one so he can tell me his review about it
If I paid so much money it better game the shit out of games. But I honestly doubt ARM can with the overhead of emulation. And they don't even specify what kind of nvidia graphics it has. This tells me that the system isn't really meant to be used for gaming.
If I paid so much money it better game the shit out of games.
Laughs in Apple
up to RTX 6000 ADA
ut I honestly doubt ARM can with the overhead of emulation
Most modern software (games excluded), is dynamically compiled. This means that it's not all one "bundle" that runs, but rather a binary that calls reusable pieces of code, "libraries" from the binary itself. Wine is dynamically compiled.
What makes modern x86 to arm translators special, is that the x86 binary, like an x86 version of wine, can call upon the arm versions of the libraries it uses — like graphic drivers. It's because of this that the people on r/emulationonandroid managed to play GTA 5 with 30 fps via the computer version. There definitely is overhead, but it's not that much, and a beefy machine like this could absolutely handle it.
https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/blog/scale-22/#exhibition-hall
The Facebook/Meta table had a booth where they had an ARM macbook that was running steam and they were installing games on it.
Nice!
Proton for ARM is not (currently) a thing, if that's a factor
Arm processor, an nVidia graphics card, and Ubuntu? Err, doesn't sound great.
You're right...
...put NixOS on dat thang.
I only run arch, btw. 🤣
512gb of ram you say? That's legendary 3rd chrome tab territory.
LMAO
The Ampre Altra runs from 32 to 128 cores (dear gods that's beautiful), but with that architecture, and the company's stated purpose, it makes more sense in a computer meant to be used as a server rather than a desktop gaming rig. You'd use a chip like that in a Kubernetes cluster for example.
Combined with an Nvidia card, a brand notorious for being a Pain In The Ass in Linuxland, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the intended purpose of a box like this is a server for AI/ML-based services.
a freaking love the specs but godddddd....I wish this bloody thing was general purpose, it'll be so perfect, like imagine this thing compiling gentoo with dwm.......maaaaaan
I mean, you can buy it and use it in a general purpose fashion, and yeah, those cores would do wonders for all sorts of compiles. Also, it can be useful if you're like me and do a lot of Dockerised development. Given that most games are x86 only though, sadly this would be no good :-(
It should be able to run games that support ARM. That means you are pretty much limited to open source games. The CPU clock speed is fairly low, so don't expect great performance. These systems are intended for heavily multithreaded workloads.
With one of these Altra CPUs (Q64-22), I can compile the Linux kernel (defconfig aarch64 with modules on GCC 15.1) in 3m8s with -j64. Really great for compiling, and much lower power draw than any x86 system with a comparable core count. Idles at 68W full system power, pulls 130W when all cores are under full load. Pulling out some of my 4 RAM sticks can drive that down a lot more than you'd expect for just RAM. lm_sensors claims the "CPU Power" is 16W and 56W in those two situations.
Should be awful for gaming. It's possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread) suffers a lot. I run a few containers where the performance hit really doesn't matter through qemu.
Ampere has a weird PCIe bug that results in either outright incompatibility or a video output filled with strange artifacts/distortion for the vast majority of GPUs, with the known good selection that aren't bugged being only a few select Nvidia ones. I don't happen to have any of those Nvidia cards but this workstation includes one. Other non-GPU PCIe things like NICs, NVMe, and SAS storage controllers work great, with tons of PCIe lanes.
oh dang, I didn't know, thank you so much for the info
Should be awful for gaming. It’s possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread)
Most modern software (games excluded), is dynamically compiled. This means that it’s not all one “bundle” that runs, but rather a binary that calls reusable pieces of code, “libraries” from the binary itself. Wine is dynamically compiled.
What makes modern x86 to arm translators special, is that the x86 binary, like an x86 version of wine, can call upon the arm versions of the libraries it uses — like graphic drivers. It’s because of this that the people on r/emulationonandroid managed to play GTA 5 with 30 fps via the computer version. There definitely is overhead, but it’s not that much, and a beefy machine like this could absolutely handle it.
https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/blog/scale-22/#exhibition-hall
The Facebook/Meta table had a booth where they had an ARM macbook that was running steam and they were installing games on it.
"Dynamically compiled" and dynamic linking are very different things, and in turn dynamic linking is completely different from system calls and inter-process communication. I'm no emulation expert but I'm pretty sure you can't just swap out a dynamically linked library for a different architecture's build for it at link time and expect the ABI to somehow work out, unless you only do this with a small few manually vetted libraries where you can clean up the ABI. Calling into drivers or communicating with other processes that run as the native architecture is generally fine, at least.
I don't know how much Asahi makes use of the capability (if at all), but Apple's M series processors add special architecture extensions that makes x86 emulation be able to perform much better than on any other ARM system.
I wouldn't deny that you can get a lot of things playable enough, but this is very much not hardware you get for the purpose of gaming: getting a CPU and motherboard combo that costs $1440 (64-core 2.2GHz) or $2350 (128-core 2.6GHz) that performs substantially worse at most games than a $300 Ryzen CPU+motherboard combo (and has GPU compatibility quirks to boot) will be very disappointing if that's what you want it for. Though the same could to a lesser extent be said even about x86 workstations that prioritize core count like Xeon/Epyc/Threadripper. For compiling code, running automated tests, and other highly threaded workloads, this hardware is quite a treat.
@Ace120C , well, after a super brief search, it seems like it can run Steam and thus game technically. However, the performance costs of stacking "emulation" on top of each other seems rather burdensome. If you're running a Windows game on Proton, you have those call Windows-Linux conversions stacked on top of the x86_64-ARM call conversions. I can only speculate, maybe it's not as big of a thing as I imagine it being.
considering the cpu can reach crazy core counts wouldn't that help perhaps?
I'm not too familiar on how well the x64 - ARM conversion works, but in general gaming tends to be more dependent on single core performance and I'd assume that emulating single core functionality with multiple cores doesn't really work, or at least with performance you'd need.
Yeah truely multithreaded games are a rarity (and hard).
maybe it’s not as big of a thing as I imagine it being.
Yes, see my other comments in this thread for an explanation of this. The trick is that not all the calls are translated, as wine is able to use the arm version of the libraries rather than the x86 version.
Yes, but not many games run on ARM natively.
Box64 helps a lot with ARM compatibility, but yes less compatible than a comparable 3.2k gaming PC on x86
At least my game engine, PixelPerfectEngine, is being tested on the Raspberry Pi 400, so a stronger hardware with Linux shouldn't be an obstacle, but that engine isn't made for that kind of spectacle if you can decode its name.
So it has the first ever version of an Nvidia graphics card?
Love it. Want it (but not to game)
you could probably put a decent graphics card in it, but it might be buggy on ARM. and youd have to set up box64 or something, which may still come with its own share of problems. not sure how dxvk proton and the compatibility layers for games work on it either.
ARM is still not quite there yet for gaming. interesting little machine though.
Actually, with the work done on box86/box64, you might be able to get stuff running well - last I heard, they got triple A games running around 45 FPS on Asahi on Apple M1.
However, it would be totally unsupported, and who knows how well the Apple M series optimizations will work on another member of the ARM family. (Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been tried on Ampere at least once.)
Really, the biggest issue is probably power usage - I don’t know if it’s enough to increase your power bill significantly, but it would definitely consume more power than say, an i7. This is due to Altra CPUs really being more for server usage - performance per watt will likely be better overall for those kinds of workloads, but you’re probably not going to make full use of the hardware. These systems are really more of server dev kits than daily drivers.
For a desktop, I’d just recommend a PC with a high end consumer grade CPU like an i7 or Ryzen 7.
Checkout Jeff geerling on YT, I think he did a review on this or something very similar.
he didn't go indepth unfortunately
Why has it got 40Tb of storage? What's this for
Says "up to". It will probably come with 2TB, but they are happy to put in more if you want to pay for extra. But 40TB is when they start to refuse your unreasonable requests.
Presumably the price that they're quoting is for everything to be maxed out then. Seems like a really odd way of doing it.
Unfortunately the single core speed of arm chips is not fabulous, that's what is mainly required for good performance in most games. You're best off going with a r traditionally supported cpu for now. The revolution will come (and it'll most likely be RISC).
Yes:
https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/blog/scale-22/#exhibition-hall
The Facebook/Meta table had a booth where they had an ARM macbook that was running steam and they were installing games on it.
He's asking if it can run games, not if he can install them
Yes, you can run games. See my other comments in the thread, it's now possible to use Arm translation to play PC games on android devices.