You should know that RISC-V is a project started at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. It currently has volunteer collaborators and many industry workers from outside the institution. What’s more, this architecture is managed by RISC-V International, based in Switzerland.
This design is characterized by being based on a reduced instruction set called “ISA” or “ISA instructions”. It is based on the RISC architecture, which is the same one on which ARM chip designs are based. The difference is that RISC-V is open source and royalty-free, allowing anyone to use and adapt the designs at no cost.
Can you play The Witcher 3 on a PC with a RISC-V processor?
Playing video games is a very common practice on computers and other devices. It is a good way to disconnect from a long day of work and/or studies. In addition, we want to do it well, with a good FPS rate and good graphic quality.
They decided to test the game The Witcher 3 on a system that uses a RISC-V processor. The developers of Box86/Box64 have done this test. A RISC-V processor has been used. x86 instruction emulator, Wine and DXVK to overcome the problems of using Linux instead of Windows.
The demo has been posted on the developers’ blog, showing the full process and the complexity of it. They have also uploaded a video to YouTube, running the game.
Don’t get too excited about the idea of giving up Intel or AMD processors for gaming, or even giving up Windows. The Witcher 3 barely manages to reach the 15 FPS on average, a figure that is totally insufficient to play smoothly.
Although it is not playable, it is a great technical achievement to be able to run a AAA game on a RISC-V architecture processor. This chip design is still in an early stage of development with very little software support, let alone games.
You have to keep in mind that The Witcher 3 is a complex and graphically demanding game. So getting the best possible performance from this game on such a green architecture is very complicated.
As the Box86/Box64 developers explain on the blog, they have encountered many problems. The first one to run The Witcher 3 is that the game has been developed for x86_x64 processors. As the game (or software) is very dependent on the type of instructions, running it on another architecture is very complicated. A “translation” is required that must replace or duplicate tasks.
Thus, the biggest challenge has been to emulate the x86_x64 instructions so that the RISC-V processor can understand them. They detail in the blog that some of the x86 instructions are very difficult to translate efficiently. This means that in some cases a lot of power is wasted in this conversion process. They indicate that x86 instructions that are considered simple become very complex in RISC-V architecture.
It should be noted that for this exercise a Milk-V Pioneer system with a 64-core RISC-V processor with a PCIe slot was used. An AMD RX 5500 XT graphics card was installed to run The Witcher 3.