Asahi Linux Brings Support For AAA Gaming To Apple Silicon Macs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: The Fedora Asahi Remix GNU/Linux distribution is now shipping with alpha versions of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers that allow you to play some games on Macs with M1 or M2 series processors. But there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that most of the PC games you're likely going to want to play are designed to run on Windows PCs with DirectX drivers and x86 processors. So there's some emulation required to get them to run on Macs with ARM-based processors, a Linux-based operating system, and Vulkan drivers.

Some of the work was also made possible by the folks at Valve, who developed the Proton software that allows many PC games to run on Linux. And during a live demo at XDC 2024, developer Alyssa Rosenzweig demonstrated the Steam game client loading and running on an Apple Silicon Mac running Asahi Linux. For that reason, it takes a lot of RAM -- according to the Asahi team, "most games require 16GB of memory due to emulation overhead." So you're probably not going to be able to do much entry-level gaming on an entry-level Mac with just 8GB of RAM.

Some of the titles that have been confirmed to be playable include Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Control, Portal 2, and Ghostrunner. But there's a difference between playable and smooth. Developers say performance improvements will be required before "newer AAA titles" can run at 60 frames per second or higher. But less demanding games like Hollow Knight should run at full speed.

And to be clear

[drinkypoo]

Developers say performance improvements will be required before "newer AAA titles" can run at 60 frames per second or higher.

Yes, improvements in the performance of the underlying hardware, not just the emulation software.

Soon Linux will have NTSYNC and Wine performance will take another big step forwards... but not on Mac OS.

Re:

[mccalli]

Apple take a different approach to WINE here. Apple don't emulate (within the broad use of the word 'emulate' - wine is not an emulator etc.), they recompile. The API calls are looked for, translated to ARM and Metal, then run natively.

Whether this is better or worse isn't really what I'm saying here. It's that the whole "soon this will be kernel compatible" bit isn't needed, because they recompile the code anyway,

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Whether this is better or worse isn't really what I'm saying here. It's that the whole "soon this will be kernel compatible" bit isn't needed, because they recompile the code anyway,

Oh, the article is garbage? Bummer. I should have expected that from Slashdot, I guess. The article says literally nothing about that and gives the impression by talking about drivers that they are just running Proton under emulation, same for the summary. The article says emulation repeatedly and doesn't say translation or recompilation even once; The summary does the same. I guess I should have figured out the author didn't know what he was talking about when he said "the folks behind the Asahi Linux team

Re:

[mccalli]

For their Linux distro they likely are running Proton or a Protonalike. For Apple's official game-porting-toolkit, it's a bit different. They do have the glue that Proton provides between say Vulkan and Metal, but once the x86 code is hit it is recompiled to ARM and directly library calls. Like a one-time JIT, if you will.

I run Elder Scrolls Online on my M2 - zero issues, and Zenimax don't officially support it on anything other than x86.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I'm not surprised the translation works, that's a pretty mature technology at this point and Apple clearly can employ competent programmers. It's a nice bonus for people who bought a Macintosh because they wanted to run some specific software. The price:performance is still poor though, and the power:performance is about the same as AMD. On balance I'd rather just run Linux. Luckily, I don't need any software which won't run on it, and if I do I can run it in a VM because I'm not doing e.g. live audio recor

Re:

[NoMoreACs]

I'm not surprised the translation works, that's a pretty mature technology at this point and Apple clearly can employ competent programmers. It's a nice bonus for people who bought a Macintosh because they wanted to run some specific software. The price:performance is still poor though, and the power:performance is about the same as AMD. On balance I'd rather just run Linux. Luckily, I don't need any software which won't run on it, and if I do I can run it in a VM because I'm not doing e.g. live audio recording. (With Linux getting rt mainlined, though, the benefits to doing that on any other platform is going away.)

Multitrack Recording on Linux?!? You are a masochist!

Re:

[guruevi]

Modern emulation (like QEMU and various others) do often not just emulate an entire CPU in software like what you're thinking of is done with 8-bit CPU - https://www.qemu.org/docs/mast... [qemu.org]

Re:

[serafean]

The good article is here:
https://asahilinux.org/2024/10... [asahilinux.org]

It goes something like this:
cyberpunk
wine
FEX -> x86 to arm translation
DXVK/vkd3d-proton -> DirectX to vulkan.
muvm -> VM running a 4K page size linux kernel (Asahi is 16K)
hardware
 

Re:

[NoMoreACs]

Apple take a different approach to WINE here. Apple don't emulate (within the broad use of the word 'emulate' - wine is not an emulator etc.), they recompile. The API calls are looked for, translated to ARM and Metal, then run natively.

Whether this is better or worse isn't really what I'm saying here. It's that the whole "soon this will be kernel compatible" bit isn't needed, because they recompile the code anyway,

Transpile. Or, Transcompile. No jokes intended.

But you're right. Much more performant.

Re:

[caseih]

Seeing as Asahi is Linux, then yes it well have the ntsync goodness. Eventually AAA games will hopefully be playable on wine in Linux on the m series CPU.

And the 30%?

[Vranitzky]

I hardly doubt apple would allow games to run without taking their cut. Watch them sue asahi once the technology matures enough to allow proper gaming. I hope the asahi people had some very very good lawyer comb all the TOS apple ever released since introducing arm processors

Re:

[caseih]

What are you going on about? Sorry that makes no sense whatsoever. Do you know what Asahi Linux is? Nothing at all to do with macOS or the apple store.

Re:

[tiananmen tank man]

Next mac OS update is just going to break all this "goodness", mac ain't done till wine don't run. Even valve isn't putting in the resources to release counter strike 2 on mac.

Re:

[caseih]

Not sure what you mean? This article is about Wine in Linux, not macOS. Asahi provides vulkan drivers and enables an OpenGL stack for Linux apps on the M cpu. Combined with some cpu translation, this lets x86 windows games run on Linux on the M1 etc.

Re:

[Rockoon]

whenever you say linux, do you mean bsd?

Re:

[caseih]

Nope. Linux. These comments are very strange.

Re:

[NoMoreACs]

I hardly doubt apple would allow games to run without taking their cut. Watch them sue asahi once the technology matures enough to allow proper gaming. I hope the asahi people had some very very good lawyer comb all the TOS apple ever released since introducing arm processors

Just. Stop. It.

And surprise, the Hatians in Springfield, OH, still aren't eating Dogs and Cats (at least not on purpose).

Kudos!

[aRTeeNLCH]

Wow, what a wasteland regarding news for nerds comments...! (No disrespect to the few informed comments here.) Congratulations to the Asahi Linux team for getting this far, and good luck on making further progress! Through I don't own any Mac hardware, this project means that in the future I can pick up some (cheaply secondhand) and put my favourite OS to work. Since I live in a country with practically highest Mac market share, things are looking good. Thank you team Asahi!