I reckon if you send a gamer kid down to the store to buy a PC they will come back with an Intel architecture machine, even if there were ARM machines there.
With Nvidia, AMD, and MS pushing, most new releases will probably have an ARM release, and older games can run with translation. The main problematic niche is older releases that are very CPU bound (like some sim games).
They seem to care a great deal about their hardware and gamer teenagers also seem to spend alot more time analysing hardware and milliseconds performance advantages than anyone else. They literally care about mouse latency in milliseconds.
They spend a huge amount of time on YouTube and online forums talking gaming hardware. If the word on the street is that ARM is milliseconds slower than Intel then they won't buy it. There's lots of huge YouTube channels that do nothing but measure game performance on various hardware.
And yet even dedicated gaming keyboards often have 50ms latency or more internally, and the last YT video I've seen on "system latency" actually didn't look at any latencies and just measured frame render times. I don't know of a single channel that does actual keyboard-to-screen latency measurements.
The gaming community may care about numbers but I don't know if most actually know what those numbers say.
FEX-Emu would like a word. The asahi people recently used FEX to run Portal on arm laptops.
They JIT the x86 code to arm and their codegen is good enough to maintain most of native performance. Each new release brings them closer to closing the gap.
Portal 2 is demanding enough of a real-time FPS to demonstrate the principle and FEX is only becoming more optimized. It won't be long until it's running AAA games on low settings.
Older games are often already flaky on the current versions of the platforms they were first made for, there's no great easy business in taking legacy PC games and fixing them to be well emulated/translated.
Well if you go far back enough (like games that need DirectX8 or games that don't work on W10), the compatibility layers get really good, and overhead doesn't matter at all because they run at a billion fps.
Except for MS' Direct Draw implementation under Windows 8 and beyond, were your 1999 game runs like a dog under an i5, and you need a wrapper to translate DDraw to OpenGL.
Really? If a gamer saw a Nvidia gaming3000 arm CPU next to the GTX 5090 he was about to buy, I'm sure he's seriously consider it instead of the obvious boring Intel.
Depends on if they keep up with the news. NVidia has repeatedly burned a lot of goodwill with the gaming community in the last few years. They catered to crypto miners (resulting a shortage of affordable cards for gamers for years), tried to sell a 4080 that was effectively a 4070, and then released the 4060 with what is perceived to be insufficient memory to last through the current console generation.
The 4060 doesn't seem to have any performance improvement over the 3060 either, so people can just opt for the older card. Or even buy a 3070 instead. ;)
