Linux

6803 readers

369 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system

Also check out:

Original icon base courtesy of [email protected] and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

114

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

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 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] 14 points 5 months ago

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

load more comments (3 replies)