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Gaming on Linux with ARM64 is about to get more interesting, with the team at CodeWeavers announcing a new CrossOver Preview. They said this has been years in the making through different releases of Wine gradually adding more of what's been needed.

What is CrossOver? It's from the team that support Wine development, which adds their own UI and tooling on top of Wine to make the experience a little bit easier, along with dedicated support. Some of their team also work with Valve on Proton.

From the blog post:

In January 2024, ARM64 support was released in Wine 9.0 for running native Windows ARM binaries and emulated i386 code. In May 2024, the CrossOver team completed work making a native ARM64 CrossOver client. The Wine 10.0 release in January 2025 included full support for ARM64EC to run emulated x86-64 code. Tackling ARM64EC involved not only significant Wine development, but also extensive compiler development to essentially implement a brand new architecture. The existing LLVM toolchain already had support for ARM64, and Wine developers worked on the ARM64EC support that was included in the LLVM 21 release. Finally, once ARM64EC development was complete in upstream Wine, the CrossOver team integrated FEX into CrossOver to handle i386 and x86-64 emulation and our QA team completed an extensive testing sweep.

CodeWeavers have been testing on the System76 Thelio Astra which has an Ampere Altra CPU and an NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti with Ubuntu 24.04. In their testing they were able to see these results:

Game Average FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 120
Hades II 60
Path of Exile 2 60
Ghost of Tsushima 50

That's a pretty expensive system though.


Pictured - Cyberpunk 2077, credit: CD PROJEKT RED

Really interesting tech, and continues to show what's possible with open source. CodeWeavers' Meredith Johnson notes how "we envisage CrossOver as a viable solution for migrating enterprise Windows workloads to Linux for improved security and reduced bloat".

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Apps, ARM, Misc, Wine
18 Likes
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7 comments Subscribe

CatKiller 19 hours ago
CodeWeavers' Meredith Johnson notes how "we envisage CrossOver as a viable solution for migrating enterprise Windows workloads to Linux for improved security and reduced bloat".

Steam on Arm machines also seems like a tastier prospect now this work's been done.
Shmerl 19 hours ago
I wonder if they are running games using vkd3d or vkd3d-proton?
kaktuspalme 14 hours ago
I wonder if Valve is considering an ARM CPU for the Steam Deck 2.
Shmerl 12 hours ago
I wonder if Valve is considering an ARM CPU for the Steam Deck 2.

I see no benefits for them to do it. Unless AMD will make an APU with ARM CPU cores (supposedly AMD does plan something like that). And even then, how would it be better than x86_64 APU?

And for a handheld performance penalty for emulating x86_64 on ARM is going to make it additionally problematic.


Last edited by Shmerl on 7 Nov 2025 at 2:06 am UTC
Phlebiac 3 hours ago
Are there any game studios that have embraced, or even half-heartedly supported, Windows on ARM64? To me, it looks like one of those "nobody wants to do it because nobody is doing it".

Edit: OK, there's a list. Looks like they are mostly casual mobile/tablet style games, and for ARM not ARM64:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Windows_ARM_games


Last edited by Phlebiac on 7 Nov 2025 at 10:54 am UTC
Eike 3 hours ago
  • Supporter Plus
To me, it looks like one of those "nobody wants to do it because nobody is doing it".

More like "Nobody wants to do it, because it is work/costs money and doesn't pay"?
orzo 2 hours ago
  • Supporter
When Pi 500+ becomes available in my part of Eu (in two weeks?) and its keyboard proves to be usable, it will definitely get a lot of "Amiga/ST" love from me, but if CodeWeavers help me play new itch games or gog games on it... emoji
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