This would presumably let x86 windows games run on ARM hardware.
This is almost certainly meant for the next Valve VR headset, but ARM has so much better power efficiency than x86 that a future ARM based Deck would be a huge improvement to battery life.
Also see this tweet:
VR games that have already secretly pushed Android ARM builds onto the Steam Store are ran via Waydroid (androidARM to LinuxARM)
VR games that do not have an ARM build on Steam (windows x86) are being translated/emulated via ProtonARM and FEX
Edit: here’s gamingonlinux coverage of this info, includes some more information
this could be the biggest thing to ever happen to Mac gaming.
does rosetta 2 not already handle this scenario for macs?
AFAIK Rosetta deals with Intel Mac apps, not Windows. If this handles Windows games like Proton does… pretty big news!
exactly, rosetta has nothing to do with windows apps.
Apple has their own wine based tool called Game Porting Toolkit that runs windows games and uses Rosetta.
Rosetta is for the game makers, proton is for the fans. So its easier for people to make the games work vs waiting on the game developers to manually port it using rosetta
This is basically what Apple’s game porting toolkit does, except that’s not meant for distributing to end users (probably because they don’t want to expose their users to the bugs inherent to such emulation layers).