FSO Crashes few seconds into mission in Windows on Snapdragon ARM hardware

[czoj19]

Game crashes few seconds or minutes into starting any mission. Screen freezes for a few seconds followed by the crash.

Running Vanilla FS2 straight from GOG.com works perfectly without any FPS drop or crashes.

fs2_open.log

FSO Build 24.2.0
Windows 11 Home
Processor Snapdragon(R) X 12-core X1E80100 @ 3.40 GHz (3.42 GHz)
Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.6 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, ARM-based processor

Log:
https://fsnebula.org/log/695518f6487e3bcd4e0010f5

[chromi]

You're running an x86 binary on an ARM CPU. Everything's therefore going through a translation layer. These translation layers commonly have trouble with programs using the more advanced instruction set extensions, such as AVX2.

You may have better luck using the SSE2 version of the engine. You could also see if one of the ARM builds works on your machine.

[czoj19]

You're running an x86 binary on an ARM CPU. Everything's therefore going through a translation layer. These translation layers commonly have trouble with programs using the more advanced instruction set extensions, such as AVX2.

You may have better luck using the SSE2 version of the engine. You could also see if one of the ARM builds works on your machine.

Thanks for the advice. I tried changing to the Win-64 SSE2 version of the engine, but still having the same issue.

Knossos.NET doesnt allow me to modify the engine to the Mac-arm64 version, and I can't find any other ARM builds in their list.

Do you have any advice to proceed?

[notimaginative]

The Win64 builds are known to crash on Snapdragon hardware. I believe we tracked this down to a driver issue, which is on to Qualcomm to fix, so there really isn't much we can do about it.

Though not fully tested, what does appear to work is native WinARM64 builds. FSO has support for this but we haven't added them to the build pipeline yet (due to issues with github's arm64 runners). I'll try to make a custom WinARM64 build for 25.0 once it's released and put it on Knossos, if you can wait another week or so. Otherwise you'll have to set up a build environment yourself and make your own builds.

[czoj19]

The Win64 builds are known to crash on Snapdragon hardware. I believe we tracked this down to a driver issue, which is on to Qualcomm to fix, so there really isn't much we can do about it.

Though not fully tested, what does appear to work is native WinARM64 builds. FSO has support for this but we haven't added them to the build pipeline yet (due to issues with github's arm64 runners). I'll try to make a custom WinARM64 build for 25.0 once it's released and put it on Knossos, if you can wait another week or so. Otherwise you'll have to set up a build environment yourself and make your own builds.

Thanks for the explanation. I'll wait for your custom build then.

For the not-so-well-informed, why wouldnt the win32 builds work better? I gave it a try and it still crashes all the same.

[notimaginative]

For the not-so-well-informed, why wouldnt the win32 builds work better? I gave it a try and it still crashes all the same.

I don't remember the details, and unfortunately can't find where it was discussed, but it's some bug/issue in the Qualcomm video drivers which causes it to crash when running some non-native (ie, not arm64) 3D graphics code. So win32 builds would have the same problem as win64 builds.

Qualcomm might have some updated video drivers you could try (drivers for Snapdragon X Elite), though I can't say whether that would make things better or worse. You're sort of on your own there as we don't really have any way to test on that hardware.

The safest bet is to wait for the arm64 build, and hopefully that will work a lot better for you.