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

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

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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] 28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 8 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 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] 1 points 18 hours 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] 26 points 1 day ago

Windows games on Linux software and Apple hardware. what a time to be alive!

[–] onlinepersona 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I said it a while ago and it's getting much closer now: Linux will become the OS for people who want to game on a Mac. With all the work going into this, hopefully the devs are getting nice donations. They seem to be doing a better job than Malus at getting games to run.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

While it’s disappointing that the Mac, with all its power, hasn’t been a larger target for games, I’m happy there are more ways to play Windows games without windows.