Test performance of Crossover Preview for arm64

[geerlingguy]

See: Twist our ARM64, here's the latest CrossOver Preview

I have been testing the Crossover Preview edition for Arm64 on the following systems:

• System76 Thelio Astra M128-30 (with Nvidia RTX 4080 Super)
• Minisforum MS-R1 (with Nvidia RTX A2000 Laptop)
• Raspberry Pi (TBD... going to see if I can get it going on AMD cards)

I'll leave my notes on the experience here.

Firstly, a video demonstrating the out of the box experience under Ubuntu 24.04/25.10 on the Thelio Astra and MS-R1, respectively:

(click the image above to play)

[geerlingguy]

In the video, I noted some choppy performance on both systems, maxing out around 12 fps in the built-in Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark. @bexcran noticed the card was operating at PCIe Gen 1 x16, as indicated by nvtop:

This may or may not indicate a problem, as the Nvidia driver doesn't allow forcing persistent Gen 4 link speed. However, PCIe ASPM has caused issues for me in the past in other tests, so I figured it was worth a try checking it out here too.

So I added pcie_aspm=off to /etc/default/grub in the CMDLINE, then ran sudo update-grub and rebooted.

Testing again, I got almost double the performance, and the card seemed to do a better job of remaining at Gen 4 speeds (though it would still downgrade here and there):

So... maybe some other PCIe links that would cause issues due to ASPM?

[geerlingguy]

Here's a video of the conclusion of the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark with pcie_aspm=off:

IMG_4868-ezgif.com-resize-video.mov

[geerlingguy]

On the Raspberry Pi, I tried installing the Preview, and that worked, but when it asked for my registration information, and I entered it, it would repeatedly say 'Registration failed'.

After chatting with someone from Codeweavers, apparently there's a CLI option:

# Note that the path is different for the non-preview edition:
sudo -H /opt/cxpreview/bin/cxregister

That worked, seeing if I can get Cyberpunk 2077 going on the Pi :)

[geerlingguy]

On the Thelio Astra, I set every setting to Off or Low, and set the resolution to the lowest (1024x768), and it still only got 25 fps, so I think there's a bottleneck somewhere, as the CPU wasn't going 100% and the GPU wasn't nearly that either.

[geerlingguy]

On the Pi, I let it run installing Steam for over an hour, but after it started installing the update (the initial install was fine), the CPU got stuck at 100% on one of the threads, and just stayed like that until I force quit it. Not sure what's up with that.

I tried deleting the bottle and creating it anew, but that didn't work either.

Edit: I also tried setting up Box64/Steam via Pi-Apps (which is compatible with Trixie now), but that ran into similar issues, this time with more logs. Will try to investigate that more later.

[bexcran]

I was only getting a relatively low fps too until I switched the graphics backend (in the Crossover bottle settings) from Automatic to DXVK or Wine, which bumped it to around 70-80 fps from 30-40.

I found a post indicating you can avoid the NVIDIA card downgrading the link generation by locking the clocks using nvidia-smi. I found I was able to keep it at Gen 4 by running:

sudo nvidia-smi -lgc 3000,3000
sudo nvidia-smi -lmc 5000,5000

[geerlingguy]

I switched to DXVK manually, but that seemed to make no difference.

I set the card to forced Gen 4x16 using the two commands you listed above, and that did seem to more consistently give me 24-25 fps, whether on tiny / low settings, or on ultra / 1080p:

I noticed the GPU wasn't doing too much (less than 50% load at 1080p with all settings maxed), but the CPU load was 900-1200%, and I saw the CPU was still idling at like 1.1 GHz or something, via btop.

So I forced performance on all cores with:

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Then ran the ultra / 1080p benchmark again, now getting a smoother 33 fps:

I'm not sure what's hanging up my system from getting more than that :/