Notes from testing the Windows on ARM 2023 dev kit (aka Project Volterra)
Cliff notes before I forget:
- It's cool!
- Wait it's actually quite hot, TDP seems cranked all the way up (probably for the best)
- 'Efficiency mode' does exactly what you'd expect, chucks a process to the efficiency cores
- x86/x64 apps seem fine broadly, though definitely a bit sluggish e.g. lag on opening
- I'd be miffed if I paid £1600 for an SQ3 Surface Pro 9 then ran x86 stuff all day, for a mac mini style £580 device who cares
- First time using WSL2 instead of dual booting, it's neat
- WSL2 not perfect, more down below.
- ARM native stuff in WSL2 runs waaaaay faster than x86 in windows, 3.3x speedup in one browser benchmark
- Vivaldi, Discord, Steam, VSCode all run fine
- Steam can't max out a gigabit connection, too much CPU load :D
- Some games work fine, definitely slower than my steam deck.
- e.g. Borderlands 3 works, slowly. CSGO, HL2, Astroneer, Halo MCC all fine except...
- GPU driver seems to be a bag of bolts, 2D fine but 3D can crash the whole system. No BSOD so hard to start debugging
- No Vulkan or (I think) recent OpenGL. DirectX 9-12 only.
- Easy anticheat (and I imagine lots of anticheat) has an architecture check and says no on ARM
- MiniDP only if you want to see the UEFI but the only interesting bit there was boot order and secure boot disable
- USB Boot and PXE Boot supported, shenanigans?
- Where do I even go for support on e.g. GPU drivers?
So my system crashes under GPU load and I wondered whether this could be memory related since the GPU shares system RAM. I tried the windows memory diagnostic utility but mdsched was missing from my system. I tried booting memtest86 which supports ARM, seems anything with a BOOTAA64.efi probably works. Memtest86 booted but then wanted me to press a button to start while not accepting any keyboard input. Not sure what was going on there. I tried Ubuntu Server 22.10 ARM from a USB drive and that didn't seem to be recognised as bootable.
My list of working games is shrinking, Halo MCC started crashing on me. It seems 'new' graphics trigger this more quickly than old? Still I get no BSOD or event logs to debug so I don't know where to begin.
I ran https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/ across a few machines to give an idea of performance.
- Volterra, edge, windows, arm64 - 148rpm
- Volterra, vivaldi, windows, x86 - 33.2rpm
- Volterra, vivaldi, linux (wsl2), arm64 - 128rpm
- M1 MBP, firefox, macos, arm64 - 262rpm
- Surface go 2 (intel pentium 4425Y), vivaldi, linux, x86 - 44.9rpm
- i5 3570k desktop, chrome, windows, x86 - 122rpm
- MBP 16" 2019 (2.6Ghz 6 core i7), chrome, macos, x86 - 167rpm
- Pinebook pro (RK3399), vivaldi, linux, arm64 - 21.6rpm
- Steam deck, chrome, linux, x86 - 91.3rpm
- Intel i7-10510U, vivaldi, linux, x86 - 109rpm
I'm normally a linux user with my distro of choice being Manjaro based on Arch. Switching to WSL2 has been interesting. My distro choice is fairly limited, Debian or Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 and 22.04. There is an Arch WSL2 project out there but it doesn't seem to work on ARM. I initially went for Ubuntu 22.04 because newer is usually better but not this time, after installing Vivaldi I had missing audio. I tried Firefox in Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04 both of which had audio, but Firefox in 22.04 uses a Snap package and snapd doesn't work out of the box on WSL2 because it needs SystemD which also doesn't work out of the box. It looks fixable but I haven't put in the time yet. One thing about Ubuntu is its default repositories are usually out of date. Golang is a language I use with frequent releases where 1.19 is latest but the default repos had 1.18 in 22.04, 1.13 in 20.04 and 1.10 in 18.04. There are separate repos to tackle this but Arch by comparison has regular updates to this package so I don't need to think about it much. Another example is VSCode which admittedly I'll run on windows and use WSL as a remote machine but Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a package for it. Arch has one in the core repos then... 7 AURs you could use including the official microsoft binaries packaged up.
I use Mac OS at work so the question becomes would I prefer WSL2 or Mac OS? I haven't spent enough time to pass that judgement but I like the WSL2 gives me gnu tools (e.g. sed) by default, proper window management instead of 'full screen everything and swipe between them', plus I spend a lot of time in Docker so think the memory reclamation of WSL2 will help. I think I'll hit some more WSL2 jank that'll make me swing the other way soon.
Yes yes it's not a gaming PC, but who cares!
- HL2 - 5120x1440 highest settings - 80-120fps
- Battlefield Bad Company 2 - 1920x1080, medium settings - 25-45fps
- GTA 4 - 1920x1080, medium-ish settings? - 53fps in benchmark - Got a black screen when loading the story mode :(
- Zelda Windwaker (Dolphin on ARM) - 4x native resolution - 30-50fps
Not bad at all! Good enough to be irritating when it crashes because you know the hardware's capable of running X. As if to prove the point the GPU stopped responding while running Dolphin :(