This would presumably let x86 windows games run on ARM hardware.
This is almost certainly meant for the next Valve VR headset, but ARM has so much better power efficiency than x86 that a future ARM based Deck would be a huge improvement to battery life.
Also see this tweet:
VR games that have already secretly pushed Android ARM builds onto the Steam Store are ran via Waydroid (androidARM to LinuxARM)
VR games that do not have an ARM build on Steam (windows x86) are being translated/emulated via ProtonARM and FEX
Edit: here’s gamingonlinux coverage of this info, includes some more information
Not only syscalls. FEX and Box64 also allow using native libraries instead of emulating them. That leaves basically only the game logic to be emulated.
I didn’t know that, thanks! That’s actually very impressive, and given how efficient qemu-style emulators are, I wouldn’t be surprised to see near-native performance despite a little bit of overhead from emulating game logic.