TL;DR: We’ve established that Doom can run on a potato, however what about one thing extra sophisticated? A modder lately tried operating Half-Life 2 natively on a Raspberry Pi 4. The preliminary outcomes look tough however present potential for a theoretical enlargement of Valve’s platform assist.
Videos posted on Reddit this week present sections of Half-Life 2 operating natively on a Raspberry Pi 4 and an Apple M2 Macbook Air. Redditor zbios mentioned the demo’s main purpose wasn’t to check the Raspberry however to see if Valve’s Source engine might run on Arm platforms.
Before getting overly excited, know that the microcomputer would not run Valve’s seminal 2004 first-person shooter effectively. The sport manages round 15-to-20 frames per second, with the graphics set to a mixture of high and low settings at 720p.
At 1080p, the framerate can fall as little as 10fps. The sport could look barely playable, but it surely’s secure sufficient to show {that a} Source engine sport can run on an Arm-based Linux system, which was the Redditor’s main purpose.
The undertaking was doable because of the 2018 Team Fortress 2 supply code leak, which led to a model of Valve’s engine turning into freely accessible on GitHub. That code’s assist for each Arm-based system besides Windows on Arm allowed zbios to port Half-Life 2 to the Linux-based Raspberry Pi 4.
The modder subsequently used the RP construct to mod the sport for Apple’s M2 silicon, unsurprisingly dealing with the sport a lot better. The starting of the Revenholm part managed 300-400fps, additional proving the chances of porting Source engine video games to Arm. According to zbios, changing Portal must also be doable, however feedback on the GitHub web page point out Garry’s Mod is out of attain on account of its modifications to the engine.
These profitable demonstrations elevate the query of whether or not Valve might supply Arm-native variations of all of its Source engine video games on Steam, like DOTA 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (which can obtain a sequel or main replace quickly), and Portal 2. Perhaps they may be a part of the already in depth listing of video games on Steam that run natively on Apple Silicon. Additionally, Nvidia Lightspeed Studios launched Android variations of Half-Life 2 and Portal for the Nvidia Shield in 2018, proving that the inspiration for Arm assist exists.
