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Asahi Linux’s bespoke GPU driver is running Windows games on Apple Silicon Macs (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/linux

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Games are technically run inside a virtual machine because of differences in how Apple Silicon and x86 systems address memory—Apple's systems use 16 KB memory pages, while x86 systems use 4 KB pages, something that causes issues for Asahi and some other Arm Linux distros on a regular basis and a gap that the VM bridges.

Rosenzweig's post shows off screenshots of Control, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Ghostrunner, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal 2, and Hollow Knight, though as she notes, most of these games won't run at anywhere near 60 frames per second yet.

"Correctness comes first. Performance improves next," she writes.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The work the Asahi team have done boggles my mind.

They've got further with gaming on Apple silicon than Apple has with their game-porting-toolkit.

Despite:

being on a completely unsupported OS
running through a virtual machine
having to rewrite all the hardware drivers from scratch, without the benefit of having hardware schematics/documentation
not having the benefit of using APIs that were made from the ground up to work well on this hardware specifically

And probably some other stuff I'm completely in the dark on because their work is so beyond me.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

Asahi Team is literally poking around some dark magic at this point

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Can you show where they’ve gone further than apples game porting toolkit or game translation layers? Genuinely curious because I haven’t seen any comparison but do know several large profile games have come to apple silicon recently.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

It’s not quite as good as gptk. Gptk can run games like cyberpunk at 60+ fps on more powerful Mac’s but Asahi currently can’t run AAA games at 60 fps. Also gptk has support for avx which Fex technically has but doesn’t work on m1 because the chip lacks SVE(2). However I imagine in the future asahi will almost definitely be better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I mean it more in terms of wider API support than in terms of outright performance. GPTK games, when they work, certainly run faster.