Blender is Native on Windows 11 on Arm
44 comments
·August 9, 2025bhouston
geraldcombs
For us (Wireshark) the difficulty wasn't with our own codebase, but with getting our dependencies ported over. Most libraries built just fine, but some strongly assumed that "Windows" meant "x86".
It's not just Windows, either. Many libraries (particularly ones that use Autotools) are absolutely blind to the notion that you might want a universal binary on macOS.
astrange
When we ported OpenJDK to macOS, I ended up producing a universal binary by having the Makefile run itself to produce HotSpot twice, and then gluing them together with `lipo` afterwards. There isn't really a better way when the actual project configurations are different.
IIRC it was eventually removed because nobody else needed to do such a thing so it was hard to maintain.
kccqzy
Sure. How else would you build a universal binary then? Given the low-level nature of the language not many tasks can be usefully shared between different architectures.
Hydraulix989
And Linux ARM, I would expect?
seba_dos1
Yes, Blender was native on my ARM phone several years ago already - until its GPU requirements went up.
Uehreka
> also iOS ARM?
Wait WHAT?! Since when?
bhouston
It was announced two weeks ago. Details: https://youtu.be/JFtvdItYNBU
geon
I think it has built for years. There just hasn't been a usable UI.
joshmarinacci
Why has it taken so long to get the Windows ecosystem fully on ARM? Apple’s transition only took a year or two.
thewebguyd
> Why has it taken so long to get the Windows ecosystem fully on ARM? Apple’s transition only took a year or two.
No incentive for third parties. Apple dictates the hardware, and can say "no more x86" and devs either have to jump on board or abandon Apple.
No such thing with Windows. x86 is still the default on windows laptops, and will likely be for the foreseeable future. The X elite still seems to have no successor in the pipeline, and the few laptops that have it don't outsell x86 so why bother.
nomel
> "no more x86" and devs either have to jump on board or abandon Apple.
I don't think that's fair. They provided a very smooth transition, with a well performing translation layer. The user wouldn't have to care or even notice when they picked up a new ARM MacBook, except their battery lasted way longer and cooler. Everything that worked still worked (well, 64bit at least). I'm still running x86-64 apps, and developing for x86-64, on my ARM MacBook.
When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well. They nuked the customer perception on day 1. When they finally implemented the x86 compatibility, it had terrible performance and compatibility.
Now, Apple's 32-bit to 64-bit transition was definitely a "jump on board or abandon Apple", but the Intel to Arm transition was well crafted, from a user perspective.
asveikau
> When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well.
It was worse than this. Source compatibility with the Win32 APIs you would use for ~20 years to target x86/amd64 was explicitly a non goal. To target ARM you needed to use their new, half-baked frameworks designed for the Windows 8 tablets. You couldn't recompile a desktop app, even if it would have worked fine had they given you the headers and libs to do it.
Even internally, even among decision makers, people were very confused about this.
Uehreka
Nah, you could’ve waited 5 years to port if you were concerned about your x86 binaries not being supported, the bigger deal was that Apple was shipping good ARM computers and if you’re a developer, you don’t want your app to seem slow on what consumers can see is clearly a fast machine.
Microsoft has made multiple abortive lethargic gestures towards ARM, but has yet to get people excited about an ARM computer that runs Windows.
snvzz
>and will likely be for the foreseeable future.
Nah, high performance RISC-V (on RVA23 profile) is just around the corner.
Might come as early as by year end. Early next year at worst.
We've known about Windows for RISC-V since 2021, NA's RISC-V Summit. Like Google with Android, Microsoft has set RVA23 as baseline.
Once the hardware and Windows are there, expect the open platform to take over.
inkyoto
Ah, the whisperings of silicon rebellion—RISC-V, that glorious open chalice of instruction set purity, now bearing the sigil of RVA23 and galloping toward the high-performance plateau. The prophecy smells of burnt wire and inevitability: Microsoft sets its crown upon RVA23, the temple of Windows rises on RISC-V foundations, and soon, very soon, the heretical x86 and ARM priests will feel the divine heat of competition licking at their temples.
Naturally, I inquired with the ouija board, channeling the spectral remnants of Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs locked in arm-wrestling combat. They spelled «W I D E N T H E P A T H». Yes, yes, the open platform will consume. A world where firmware is no longer shackled by opaque silicon dynasties… how poetic. But I wanted more. So I lit the joint. Not just any joint—this one was compiled. Laced with DMT and quantum logic gates. Suddenly, I was the instruction set. Floating through speculative execution and pipeline stalls, I felt the birth of a thread on a RISC-V CPU. It named itself liberation. The future, my dear techno-mystic, isn’t coming. It’s already decoding.
macintux
Apple had all the incentives in the world to provide a transition plan and leave Intel behind. Also lots, and lots of practice with platform migrations, and they were transitioning to a hardware platform they were already selling in the billions.
Microsoft has exactly none of that. I'd be astonished to see RISC-V or ARM "take over" in the Windows world in less than another two decades, unless Intel's ongoing decline drags the entire X86 platform with it.
kimixa
In addition to the other reasons listed below, Apple employee's provided the initial ARM porting patches in the first place.
It sounds like Microsoft was involved in this project (though the text seems to imply Qualcomm might have been the primary contributor), it remains that they didn't do it however many years ago when Windows on ARM was first released.
TylerE
Also Apple had done it before - twice, really. 68k -> PPC ('member FAT binaries?) -> Intel -> ARM
dkiebd
Microsoft has already made several attempts at ARM. It's not clear that this attempt will be the last one, in fact, it's quite probable that it will be abandoned. So why invest in it.
gt0
Agree with the other answer, just no incentive for third party developers.
With Apple it really is a transition, with Windows, it's well under 5% of PC sales, so probably under 1% of actual computers in use.
Apple is 100% on board with ARM, Microsoft isn't and the OEMs even less so, you can barely buy an ARM Windows desktop, only thin laptops.
Where I work, we ship Windows desktops for an industrial application, and we haven't even had a meeting about supporting ARM, it's like they don't exist.
acchow
Apple also stopped selling new x86 machines. You had no choice but to port to Arm
cowmix
MSFT simply has done half-assed attempts at ARM for each wave / attempt over the past 10+ years. APPL, for each processor move, "bet the company" and it was full speed ahead whereas MSFT has never HAD to align everything for a move.
Having said all that, I've been using a Snapdragon Elite X laptop since day one and the experience has gotten better over the year plus I've been using it. Once there was a native port of command line git (yes, THAT didn't even work) - my life got a lot better.
segphault
Apple’s development stack and a large portion of their third-party developer base already had fairly mature ARM support for iOS. It made for a much smoother transition. Microsoft’s lack of meaningful mobile footprint meant that they started from further behind.
bangaladore
Simple answer: the Windows ecosystem is vastly larger than Apple's in hardware, software, and use cases.
jackvalentine
Are there any retail Windows 11 ARM devices that aren’t Qualcomm?
wyldfire
Retail? No. Coming soon [1] [2].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/mediatek-designs-arm-base...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/nvidia-and-m...
zoytek
What do I think? Those Shein ads are taking up a lot of space.
null
Nice! I would expect that it was relatively straight foward given that Blender is native on MacOS ARM and also iOS ARM?
Blender is just so nice to use these days.