MSFS on ARM CPUs (not anytime soon)

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Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Game Studios, wants the Xbox / Game Pass library to be “Play Anywhere”. In a recent interview he said that “the way games are delivered will change.” The financial statements show a sharp decline in Xbox hardware, and sharp increase in Game Pass subscriptions. A lot of speculation that the plan is to offer the library on Playstation and drop the Xbox hardware…

Right or wrong, It seems this is Microsoft’s big strategy: they bought a whole bunch of game studios to get the rights to popular games, in order to offer them via Game Pass and grow subscriptions. But to “Play Anywhere” is going to mean a lot of work adapting a lot of code to different architectures.

Having just sold my Xbox X, I am researching to build a PC for flight simulation and I started by looking at current CPUs. It seems pretty clear that the current AMD processors are the best bet.

But as Mac user, I’ve been following Microsoft’s slow but growing support for ARM support, so just out of curiosity I thought I’d look to see how plausible it would be to run MSFS on an ARM-based PC, or even in emulation on an ARM-based Mac.

The short answer seems to be, not anytime soon. But for anyone interested:

Microsoft’s Dev Blog talks about Windows and Gaming support for ARM, and similar to the Mac ecosystem, there is an emulator that converts instructions on the fly for apps written for Intel / AMD. Microsoft calls it Prism.

They have a website called Works on ARM where you can track Windows applications and games that will work on ARM:

The last report for MSFS was a year ago, as “unplayable”.

Some people I’ve asked suggest MSFS is too complex to adapt, and they might be right. But on the other hand, XPlane is written to be Universal (works on Windows, Mac including native ARM support, and Linux).

I worry that the current state of MSFS is a result of trying to do too many things at once: re-write old FS code in order to add new features, while switching to a streaming model, while trying to make it “Play Anywhere”. It feels a bit like the house collapsed while they were digging a little too far under the footings.

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Don’t forget reverse compatibility with 2020. Mission creep: Trying to be too many different games for too many disparate users. If play anywhere is the new normal, will it be difficult to keep the game from sinking to the lowest common denominators, performance wise?

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The main problem is DX12, Xplane works with Vulcan. The other problem is hardware drivers for Mac and same as with Linux. Why there are no drivers I dont know, probably $.

I really doubt it could get lower then Series S specs for MSFS. On Nintendo Switch 2 maybe full streaming, but there is nothing indicating they are working on that besides a PS4 version.

But Asobo changed a lot in the engine, who knows what it can do at some point in the future.
The only problem is that they wanted/needed to add many new features in too little time.

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In a very early Dev Q&A with Jorg, he was playing MSFS on a handheld something or other whatchyamacallit, and talked about MSFS and cloud gaming.

Phil Spence wants the Game Pass library available everywhere.

To do these things, I imagine it would simply have to be server-based rendering, and just the video is streamed to you - so when you click “Fly Now” it operates on Microsoft hardware, and you are effectively screen sharing with a server instance for your flight.

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Ok so this is going to sound weird, even for me. A few years ago when I first learned that MSFS would be coming to something other than a PC, a browser even, I got interested. It seemed to be a way to try it out before investing in hardware. What I learned back then was that MSFS via Cloud Gaming actually ran on Series S “servers” such that playing on a browser was sorta like owning a Series S.

Long story short, I got my own Series S because I wanted a yoke, etc. and that was not going to be possible with Cloud Gaming. Within about two weeks, I exchanged the Series S for a Series X and the rest is history. While I do not follow this technology, I have no reason to believe that much may has changed. Playing on a browser via Cloud Gaming is like playing on somebody else’s Series S remotely. Pretty cool if that’s all one expects/wants to experience, but I wanted more and bought the hardware peripherals that make all the difference to me. Weird, right?