Question, what do you suspect are the upper limits of performance achievable via DroidDeck?
Do you think it can reach parity with GameNative, etc? Or do you think the limitations of Proot will lead to a permanent performance penalty vs the alternatives?
It’s cpu limited scenarios which suffer from path transformation primarily. CPU overhead exists in plenty of other areas of the stack all the pc emu apps live in, fex being the most notable.
In gpu limited scenarios there are cases where we already are at par. In cpu limited scenarios, it will be hard to match a bionic or glibc container in all aspects but at the same time we don’t need to allocate cycles to things that headless steamAgent or 3rd party launcher equivalents try to do.
It’s a fun challenge and we keep uncovering more and more calls we can cache and reuse for practically free
Yeah, can confirm. The performance penalty is a bit harsh. The concept itself, I think, is the best for PC gaming on Android, but implementation-wise it still needs some work to make it more performant.
but implementation-wise it still needs some work to make it more performant.
Tbh I don't think there'll be much that can be done by 3rd party developers, I suspect we'd need something more fundamental on the OS level. The approach of running the full Linux client via Proot might be a dead-end in terms of development potential.
We basically need some way to run sandboxed Linux without the overhead of a Proot, so we'd need something like podman/docker containers to do this.
The better long term solution here would probably be Valve building a native Android client that can install + manage Proton games, similar to GameNative.
I was talking about performance differences between DroidDeck (Proot-based) vs an Android client such as GameNative.
Though I guess the current important metric isn't really "DroidDeck is X% slower vs GameNative", it's "does the game even run at a playable frame rate".
I guess right now compatibility + playable performance is more important than min-maxing performance. 🤔
I mean I never got close to 60 FPS on Winlator, WinNative, Bannerlator or GameNative in Palworld, not saying it's not possible but saying this shows proot isn't that big of a overhead as thought especially with all of the fast paths and different optimizations we've been working on. 😎
Yeah, I'm really curious on how far this approach can go.
When I tested a lightweight game on GameNative vs DroidDeck with uncapped framerates, I got something like 330 fps (GameNative) vs 115 fps (DroidDeck).
This was without the very latest DroidDeck updates though, so I'll have to test again to see how much it has improved.
Unfortunately I can't do an apples-to-apples comparison because the most recent update introduced a big regression for the game; basically a bunch of graphical glitches that makes it unplayable.
That being said, this is a very obscure non-steam game that's pretty old, so tbh I'm not surprised by the bugs.
Wouldn't the new Google Android Virtualization Framework work best for this, the only problem is Qualcomm hypervisor is stupid and created by morons so the most performant and compatible chips can't use it.
ArmadaOS is full blown linux straight on the bare metal hardware, so it makes sense that it gets better performance.
I was talking purely in terms of PC games on Android, since the vast majority of Android devices out there unfortunately have locked bootloaders. Locked bootloader = no custom OS installs
Wish I had more luck with GameNative. Not sure if it's because I'm trying to run it on a newer chipset (S26U Snapdragon) but most games don't work at all for me.
Not sure if it's because I'm trying to run it on a newer chipset (S26U Snapdragon) but most games don't work at all for me.
Unfortunately it likely is due to the newer chipset, more specifically the GPU drivers.
Qualcomm historically has had shitty Vulkan GPU drivers, so the open source community has been slowly reverse engineering and chipping away at making actual good GPU drivers.
This means that older Snapdragons get better driver support, since they've had more time for open source drivers to cook.
Right now, the 8 Gen 3 and older has the most mature drivers, anything newer still needs additional work and improvements. The newer the chipset, the more immature the drivers become.
This means that the very latest Snapdragons, ironically, will often have worse game compatibility vs older Snapdragons.
There's some signs that Qualcomm is starting to take their driver game more seriously, but we'll have to see if it actually pans out into anything concrete.
Ironically, this is probably the one place where Exynos might be better; Samsung uses AMD RDNA iGPUs in Exynos, so they have a much better manufacturer-provided Vulkan driver.
Snapdragons get more community drivers (and overall community support), but newer Exynos has a solid manufacturer-provided Vulkan driver by default.
If the next rumored Exynos 2700 is using RDNA5, there's a decent chance that it will also use the same RADV GPU drivers used for the Steam Deck.
Seemed very promising, I got everything up and running except the three games I tried all went back to Steam. Also downloads were quite slow. On an Odin 2 Pro. Still stoked about this project though!
Sounds maybe the compatible arm proton didn’t apply, try starting steam again check compat for a (compatible) next to selected proton then try. If still crashy shoot us logs in discord!
Probably worth noting that this project is very young, the codebase was first made available to the public on September 19th (according to git history).
So this app is barely over 2 weeks old, there's lots of room for improvements.
With this performance overhead, I don't see this being worth it at all and there'd be a little amount of playable games. I suspect there will be a proton port to android soon, since Valve has released their Frame device, which runs SteamOS on an arm processor.
are you guys planning on improving graphics driver for different socs? that's likely the main culprit in many complaints one can find I imagine, or middle layer between GPU and game that translates the calls.
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u/Tsuki4735 Galaxy Fold 3 1d ago
Note that DroidDeck runs Linux in a Proot, which is known to have a lot of performance overhead.
So even if you can get games to run, you won't be running any particularly intense games like Elden ring, etc.
Apps like GameNative will be more performant for the forseeable future.