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Microsoft accidentally reveals Windows 10 on ARM limitations
Microsoft launched ARM-powered Windows 10 PCs with "all-day" battery life back in December. While HP, Asus, and Lenovo's devices aren't on sale just yet, we're still waiting to hear more about the limitations of Windows 10 running on these new PCs. Microsoft published a full list of limitations last week, spotted first by Thurrott, that details what to expect from Windows 10 on ARM. This list must have been published by accident, as the software giant removed it over the weekend so only cached copies of the information are available.
Only ARM64 drivers are supported and no x64 applications are supported (yet). Games that use a version of OpenGL later than 1.1, hardware-accelerated OpenGL, or "anticheat technologies" won't work on Windows 10 on ARM. The Windows Hypervisor Platform is not supported on ARM.
Related: Big Changes Planned by Microsoft - Windows 10 on ARM, Laptops to Behave More Like Phones
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Microsoft Pulls Back on Windows 10 S
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:50AM (2 children)
So it has come to this, Microsoft can't get proper GL drivers either. Gotta run Android to get accelerated GL on ARM. That and a lot of popular ARM SoCs only support the EGL subset and they probably do not want to rewrite Windows to support that unless Windows on ARM becomes popular.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by letssee on Wednesday February 21 2018, @09:27AM (1 child)
MS doesn't like OpenGL support. They prefer you use DirectX and stay firmly locked into their ecosystem.
They could easily support OpenGL ES (all smartphones support it, so the hardware is there). They wouldn't need to 'rewrite' windows to support OpenGL ES since windows itself doesn't use OpenGL internally. It's just an extra library.
MS doesn't really support OpenGL on windows either, the GPU makers do that. The OpenGL libraries are part of your GPU driver.
It is not in MS' best interests to support OpenGL, while it is in the GPU makers best interests.
As you can't (yet?) buy discrete gpus for arm chipsets, there's no party benefiting (financially) from creating a winodws opengl driver for arm.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Wootery on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:02AM
At least Edge supports WebGL. They even give the option of using ANGLE to translate it into Direct3D (the same translation layer used by the Windows versions of both Chrome and Firefox).