felix86: New emulator that can run Steam and AAA titles on RISC-V processors

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) that serves as the basis for designing custom processors, offering an alternative to proprietary architectures like x86 and ARM. Thanks to its openness, versatility and lower costs, RISC-V is becoming widely adopted across various sectors of the tech industry and is found in embedded devices, microcontrollers, SSD controllers and more. Another less well-known area of application for RISC-V is emulation.

In this context, felix86 is a Linux userspace emulator designed to run x86 and x86-64 programs on RISC-V processors. First unveiled in March, felix86 has recently gained attention for its ability to run major games and even the Linux Steam client on RISC-V systems. In a blog post about version 25.07, developers show that triple-A video games can be run via felix86, such as The Witcher 2, The Witcher 3 and Crysis.

However, just because the games can be launched doesn't necessarily mean that they can be run in a playable way; the felix86 emulator is apparently still plagued by performance issues. Further complicating matters is the fact that the raw performance of current RISC-V processors isn't particularly high. The number of processing cores on such systems available to end users is still severely limited.