The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched on RISC-V processor — FPS is low, but everything works

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was able to run on a RISC-V processor thanks to the Box64 environment for Linux. The frame rate is low, but the game is fully functional.

The free and open-source RISC-V processor architecture is at an earlier stage of development and implementation than ARM or x86/x64. However, developers of an environment for running Windows programs on Linux Box86/Box64 still managed to run an AAA game on a RISC-V computer.

To run the game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt In addition to Box64, Wine and DXVK were used to emulate instructions. The developers have compiled a detailed description experiment on the blog and uploaded a video of the gameplay to YouTube.

Unfortunately, The Witcher 3 demonstrates only 15 FPS on such a system. But the launch on RISC-V was still a technical achievement and a hint at the possible future of the open source architecture (I would advise you to turn off the weather in the game files and remove all vegetation, as I did to run The Witcher 3 on a 2015 Intel integrated graphics card. — A. R.)

According to the Box86 developers, significant problems with running The Witcher 3 on RISC-V start with the x86_x64 instructions. The new architecture should be able to replace or duplicate these instructions. A lot of hardware resources are spent on «translation of» instructions for RISC-V.

Last August, Box86 developers made such 2D games as Stardew Valley and World of Goo fully playable on RISC-V. For The Witcher 3, it was necessary to purchase a Milk-V Pioneer, a 64-core RISC-V PC with a PCIe slot. It was needed to install an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card.

Source: Tom’s Hardware