The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has successfully been launched on a RISC-V processor thanks to the Box64 environment for Linux. Although the frame rate is low, the game runs completely.
The free, open-source RISC-V processor architecture is at an earlier stage of development and adoption compared to ARM or x86/x64. Nonetheless, the developers of the environment for running Windows applications on Linux, Box86/Box64, have managed to run a AAA game on a RISC-V computer.
To run The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, besides Box64 for instruction emulation, Wine and DXVK were also utilized. The developers have documented the experiment in detail on their blog and uploaded gameplay footage to YouTube.
Unfortunately, The Witcher 3 only displays 15 FPS on such a system. However, the launch on RISC-V remains a technical achievement and a hint at the potential future of open-source architecture (I would recommend turning off weather effects in the game files and completely removing all vegetation, as I did to run The Witcher 3 on an Intel integrated GPU from 2015. — A. R.)
According to the Box86 developers, significant challenges arise when trying to run The Witcher 3 on RISC-V, starting with x86_x64 instructions. The new architecture needs to be able to replace or duplicate these instructions. A lot of hardware resources are spent on "translating" instructions for RISC-V.
In August of last year, the Box86 developers made 2D games like Stardew Valley and World of Goo fully playable on RISC-V. For The Witcher 3, it was necessary to acquire a Milk-V Pioneer, a 64-core RISC-V PC with a PCIe slot. This was needed to install an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card.
Source: Tom's Hardware
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