Ryan Houdek
f79de3c3f9
With PR #5863, the bug that was breaking rendering in d3dx9 and Fallout New Vegas is now resolved. This means we can now enable the feature by default again as all known bugs are resolved. With 3DNow! and full x87 softfloat enabled in FO:NV inside of the starting house. The game is running at around 40-43FPS, doing ~22.6 to 34 million soft float operations per second. With 3DNow! disabled the game is running 30-31FPS, doing ~24-50 million softfloat operations per second. In both cases if x87 reduced precision is enabled then the game is running at around 108-113FPS with zero softfloat instances getting counted. Can't see the performance difference at that speed.
FEX: Emulate x86 Programs on ARM64
FEX allows you to run x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices, similar to qemu-user and box64. It offers broad compatibility with both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, and it can be used alongside Wine/Proton to play Windows games.
It supports forwarding API calls to host system libraries like OpenGL or Vulkan to reduce emulation overhead. An experimental code cache helps minimize in-game stuttering as much as possible. Furthermore, a per-app configuration system allows tweaking performance per game, e.g. by skipping costly memory model emulation. We also provide a user-friendly FEXConfig GUI to explore and change these settings.
Prerequisites
FEX requires ARMv8.0+ hardware. It has been tested with the following Linux distributions, though others are likely to work as well:
- Arch Linux
- Fedora Linux
- openSUSE
- Ubuntu 22.04/24.04/24.10/25.04
An x86-64 RootFS is required and can be downloaded using our FEXRootFSFetcher tool for many distributions.
For other distributions you will need to generate your own RootFS (our wiki page might help).
Quick Start
For Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 24.10 and 25.04
Execute the following command in the terminal to install FEX through a PPA.
curl --silent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/main/Scripts/InstallFEX.py | python3
This command will walk you through installing FEX through a PPA, and downloading a RootFS for use with FEX.
For other Distributions
Follow the guide on the official FEX-Emu Wiki here.
Navigating the Source
See the Source Outline for more information.