Windows ARM64

[JaronRH]

Since it hasn't been brought up recently, I wanted to mention that I would really like to see native ARM64 support for my Windows Pro X. 

 

Thanks! 

[John Rostron]

What has this to do with Affinity? It is a question that should be directed to Microsoft.

John

[fde101]

1 hour ago, John Rostron said:

What has this to do with Affinity?

He is asking for a native ARM64 (technically aarch64) build of the Affinity apps to run on his 64-bit ARM Windows system.

This would need to be built by Serif, so why would that be directed to Microsoft?

 

The "official" response from Serif has generally been:

 

However, this is no longer quite exactly true.  WPF is available for aarch64 (ARM64) at this point, but only supported for newer versions of Windows than the minimum versions that Serif is supporting.  They should be able to build a native aarch64 version now that would run on Windows 11, but not on Windows 10.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

However, this is no longer quite exactly true.  WPF is available for aarch64 (ARM64) at this point, but only supported for newer versions of Windows than the minimum versions that Serif is supporting.  They should be able to build a native aarch64 version now that would run on Windows 11, but not on Windows 10.

WPF support on ARM64 requires .NET release 6, but the Affinity applications use .NET 4.8, which is the limiting factor that prevents supporting ARM64.

As Serif generally does not discuss future plans, we probably won't know if they ever plan to support ARM64 until they announce availability in some future release, if they ever do.

[John Rostron]

On 6/4/2023 at 10:26 AM, fde101 said:

He is asking for a native ARM64 (technically aarch64) build of the Affinity apps to run on his 64-bit ARM Windows system.

This would need to be built by Serif, so why would that be directed to Microsoft?

That is not how I read the query. What the OP wrote was:

"I would really like to see native ARM64 support for my Windows Pro X."

No mention of Affinity.

John

[walt.farrell]

22 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

That is not how I read the query. What the OP wrote was:

"I would really like to see native ARM64 support for my Windows Pro X."

No mention of Affinity.

John

The Surface Pro X is an ARM64 device, John, and therefore the Affinity applications don't support it.

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

The Surface Pro X

What does Surface Pro X have to do with a question that explicitly mentions Windows?

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

What does Surface Pro X have to do with a question that explicitly mentions Windows?

The Surface Pro X uses an ARM64 processor, and runs Windows 10 or 11.

 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

The Surface Pro X uses an ARM64 processor, and runs Windows 10 or 11.

 

Yes, but "it" isn't what the OP is asking. Please read his question and topic title.

[walt.farrell]

22 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Yes, but "it" isn't what the OP is asking. Please read his question and topic title.

I did. And I interpreted the question, in the context of a conversation about Affinity, so it's relevant in these forums

[gnat]

Does Affinity v2 work under x64 emulation on Windows for Arm? That would be a step forward, because last time I checked v1 certainly didn't.

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, gnat said:

Does Affinity v2 work under x64 emulation on Windows for Arm? That would be a step forward, because last time I checked v1 certainly didn't.

There's a free trial, which would let you check.

[fde101]

1 hour ago, gnat said:

Does Affinity v2 work under x64 emulation on Windows for Arm? That would be a step forward, because last time I checked v1 certainly didn't.

It seemed to work under Windows 11 on my Mac Studio, which is ARM-based.

I haven't done much with it because I was basically just checking how the installer behaved after reading a few other threads early on after the v2 release - I just use the native Mac version - but I didn't run into any issues getting it started at least.

I agree with Walt's suggestion to try the trial version and see how it works on yours.

[Caramel]

Hello! 
Can you install affinity Mac apps which are designed for M1/M2 ARM cpu on windows 11 ARM release? Any videos of showing how does it work?  

[Komatös]

2 hours ago, Caramel said:

Hello! 
Can you install affinity Mac apps which are designed for M1/M2 ARM cpu on windows 11 ARM release? Any videos of showing how does it work?  

Short: No. The systems are very different.

[Barry Newman]

On 6/6/2023 at 6:54 PM, walt.farrell said:

I did. And I interpreted the question, in the context of a conversation about Affinity, so it's relevant in these forums

I don't understand how so many people spend so much energy focused on missing the obvious background to the original question that Walt interpreted and understood correctly.

However, I did learn a little more about Windows Pro X.

[smilingusr]

Is there any update on having ARM64 builds of the Affinity suite? There already are some Windows ARM devices and there will be more using the new Snapdragon X Elite. If there are any available nightly or beta build I would like to give them a try

[walt.farrell]

18 hours ago, smilingusr said:

Is there any update on having ARM64 builds of the Affinity suite? There already are some Windows ARM devices and there will be more using the new Snapdragon X Elite. If there are any available nightly or beta build I would like to give them a try

From what I've read the standard Windows builds of V2 will run on ARM64 devices, though presumably with some kind of emulation provided by Windows.

Serif have not said anything about providing ARM-specific builds.

[smilingusr]

13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

From what I've read the standard Windows builds of V2 will run on ARM64 devices, though presumably with some kind of emulation provided by Windows.

Serif have not said anything about providing ARM-specific builds.

The problem with running using Windows translation layer is that the overall application will be slow and most likely power consumption would be pretty high.
Additionally this would mean that the application would not use Qualcomm's GPUs/NPUs resulting in an even more degraded experience

[fde101]

8 hours ago, smilingusr said:

The problem with running using Windows translation layer is that the overall application will be slow and most likely power consumption would be pretty high.
Additionally this would mean that the application would not use Qualcomm's GPUs/NPUs resulting in an even more degraded experience

Not sure why this would block access to GPUs as even a number of Intel-compiled games for Windows run smoothly with accelerated 3D under ARM builds of Windows 11.  For moderate project sizes I would not think the translation layer would be a major performance barrier - slower than native, sure, but it's not THAT bad, unless you are pushing the limits of what the system can handle with a relatively large/complex project.

Note that the x64 emulation is only provided by Windows 11 on ARM, not by Windows 10, so the Affinity apps would not work under Windows 10 on ARM - only on 11 - but I'm not sure why GPU support would be a limitation.  The CPU type should be completely irrelevant to that.

[gnat]

22 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Not sure why this would block access to GPUs as even a number of Intel-compiled games for Windows run smoothly with accelerated 3D under ARM builds of Windows 11.  For moderate project sizes I would not think the translation layer would be a major performance barrier - slower than native, sure, but it's not THAT bad, unless you are pushing the limits of what the system can handle with a relatively large/complex project.

Note that the x64 emulation is only provided by Windows 11 on ARM, not by Windows 10, so the Affinity apps would not work under Windows 10 on ARM - only on 11 - but I'm not sure why GPU support would be a limitation.  The CPU type should be completely irrelevant to that.

Acceleration via DirectX 12 ought to work. OpenGL/Vulkan _might_ work, and for Affinity V1 apps definitely don't.

[gnat]

I'll also add, this is because Qualcomm only supplies DirectX drivers, because that's the minimum baseline necessary for Windows support.