Yeah well, you have heard it before. “Native gaming is what we need to bring more performance for games”. “We demand native games” and stuff like that. Truth is, among all ports we have seen so far, the ones using wrappers have almost always been the ones showing the least performance gap with Windows. But even the “native” argument is kind of redundant, because even with access to the source code, transforming DirectX calls to OpenGL calls does not make the game native per se - the engine would have to be redesigned from the ground up to take advantage of OpenGL features in order to be truly called native. And even companies like Aspyr and Feral use translators in the same fashion as ToGL to accelerate their porting efforts.

This brings us to ARMA3. ARMA3 has been in alpha/beta for a long time now on Linux, and it’s not the first video floating around. This is however the most recent one, and it shows basically parity framerate with the Windows 10 version, or even slightly better framerate when there is less action occurring on screen (three benchmarks were tested and for one of them SteamOS is slightly faster). Here are the benchmark results for each test:

YetAnotherArmaBenchmark:

Altis:

Stratis:

It’s so impressive that I thought it was worth sharing - here is the video below.

The game is being ported using eON technology (Virtual Programming) - usually refereed as a “wrapper” - while they can apparently apply it as well if they have access to the source code of the game. I suspect this is happening in this particular case since there since they have been at work to port some additional middleware as well.

There is still no hint regarding any kind of release date. Since the work is ongoing for a long time now, it seems to indicate the porting efforts have not been dropped, which is a good sign.