The Witcher 3 runs on a RISC-V CPU, but with relatively low FPS

RISC-V is still a new architecture, but its open-source nature brings a lot of potential. A good number of companies have already introduced products based on it, with the recent announcement of a new RISC-V mainboard for Framework Laptop 13 being one of them.

Given that RISC-V processors are in the early stages, there hasn't been much focus on the gaming part. However, Box86/Box64 developers have still managed to game on the Milk-V Pioneer, which is a developer motherboard with SOPHON SG2042 64-bit CPU.

The developers paired the board with an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT and played The Witcher 3. However, the experience isn't similar to what you get on mainstream x86/x64 CPUs. The gameplay is very choppy, and the developers could get at most 15 FPS.

While that's still impressive for a system with a RISC-V processor, running the game is another challenge. The developers note that the significant issues are due to the x86_x64 CPU instructions of the open-source architecture. Almost all apps and games rely on specific instructions, and when they need to run on another architecture, those instructions need to be substituted or duplicated.

So, to get The Witcher 3 running on the Milk-V Pioneer, the Box86/Box64 developers needed to use Box64, which emulated x86 instructions, while DXVK and Wine filled the gaps. However, the developers note that a few of the x86 instructions were difficult to translate.

That resulted in a lot of hardware power being dedicated to excessive "translation." If this wasn't the case, the RISC-V setup could've possibly offered a very playable experience on The Witcher 3.

As for the other details on the process of running The Witcher 3 on RISC-V, the developers have a detailed blog explaining everything. They have also put up a video of the game running, which you can check out below.

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