Friday, October 11th 2024
Latest Asahi Linux Brings AAA Windows Games to Apple M1 MacBooks With Intricate Graphics Driver and Translation Stack
While Apple laptops have never really been the first stop for PC gaming, Linux is slowly shaping up to be an excellent gaming platform, largely thanks to open-source development efforts as well as work from the likes of AMD and NVIDIA, who have both put significant work into their respective Linux drivers in recent years. This makes efforts like the Asahi Linux Project all the more intriguing. Asahi Linux is a project that aims to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs—a task that has proven rather difficult, thanks to the intricacies of developing a bespoke GPU driver for Apple's custom ARM GPUs. In a recent blog post, the graphics developer behind the Asahi Linux Project showed off a number of AAA games, albeit older titles, running on an Apple M1 processor on the latest Asahi Linux build.
To run the games on Apple Silicon, Asahi Linux uses a "game playing toolkit," which relies on a number of custom graphics drivers and emulators, including tools from Valve's Proton translation layer, which ironically was also the foundation for Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. Asahi uses FEX to emulate x86 on ARM, Wine as a translation layer for Windows apps, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton for DirectX-Vulkan translation. In the blog post, the Asahi developer claims that the alpha is capable of running games like Control, The Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 at playable frame rates. Unfortunately, 60 FPS is not yet attainable in the majority of new high-fidelity games, there are a number of indie titles that run quite well on Asahi Linux, including Hollow Knight, Ghostrunner, and Portal 2.
Amusingly, the custom driver used by Asahi Linux is the only driver currently available for Apple Silicon that conforms to OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan APIs. Gaming, of course, isn't the only focus for Asahi Linux, and the team has already started implementing general purpose x86 emulation to Asahi Linux for more generalist and workstation workloads. Asahi Linux is based on Fedora 40, and ships by default with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, and it has support for all manner of Mac computers with M1 through M2 Pro and M2 Max SoCs, with varying degrees of hardware support. The distribution is freely available to download on the Asahi Linux homepage for anyone wanting to try it out—be sure to check out the support matrix to know what hardware is and isn't supported, since it is still an alpha, and there may be issues with audio, certain ports, and features like Touch ID.
Source:
Alyssa Rosenzenzweig/Asahi Linux
To run the games on Apple Silicon, Asahi Linux uses a "game playing toolkit," which relies on a number of custom graphics drivers and emulators, including tools from Valve's Proton translation layer, which ironically was also the foundation for Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. Asahi uses FEX to emulate x86 on ARM, Wine as a translation layer for Windows apps, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton for DirectX-Vulkan translation. In the blog post, the Asahi developer claims that the alpha is capable of running games like Control, The Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 at playable frame rates. Unfortunately, 60 FPS is not yet attainable in the majority of new high-fidelity games, there are a number of indie titles that run quite well on Asahi Linux, including Hollow Knight, Ghostrunner, and Portal 2.
26 Comments on Latest Asahi Linux Brings AAA Windows Games to Apple M1 MacBooks With Intricate Graphics Driver and Translation Stack
It's also interesting how Apple has never formally gone after hackintoshes either. They don't make things easier, but they haven't taken any steps to stop that either. I've never heard of them going after a Hackintosher. The only time they've jumped in legally is when someone tries to turn it into a formal business.
You're just refusing to accept the facts if you think Apple isn't slowly but surely locking everything down, macs had far wider support for both software and hardware in the past. Think about this, you have to install a totally different OS or slow buggy translation layers if you want to use industry standard software, that's pretty much the most draconian measure to prevent people from using your products in ways you don't want them to while keeping the excuse of "hey you can still totally do this if you want to".
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578The same applies to linux tho. I can freely compile whatever I want on both my linux and MacOS machines, but the problem starts with proprietary software that was meant to run in a specific device running in a specific system to begin with.
Tbh I find it way easier to develop stuff for MacOS than Windows, and millions times better to develop stuff on (I would plainly refuse any job that forced me to deal with windows ever again).
And I say that as a MacOS hater since it more often than not just gets in my way, whereas some stuff is wayyy easier on linux.
Nah. Way I see it, the best future Asahi has is one where Apple absorbs its talent and then shuts it, and any other potential replacement, out.
Unless of course, some regulator out there figured how to get things done in less than a decade.Only thing linux made easier for me is having a centralized, OS-managed installation of development libraries, headers, compilers, etc. But honestly, I still think Visual Studio makes Windows a superior dev environment. Having a build system set by the gui without even being aware of its existence spoiled me. I only want to make stuff I can immediately use, not waste time with arcane, software engineering jargon. :(
The more hardware-agnostic and OS-agnostic our software future is the less anti-consumer and assholery the corporations making OSes will be (hopefully). At the moment, Apple, Microsoft, and to some extent Google - they all foist very questionable stuff on their (mostly) captive audience who cannot easily go elsewhere because of their hardware, drivers, or application compatibility. At the moment, it's not technically a monopoly on any of the major OSes, but it might as well be in terms of the end-user experience.
Almost as much as ZFS on Windows, which must be for the truly masochistic.
But that's me, ofc, to each their own, and the stack one works with also has a lot of relevance on that choice.I don't miss the big VS at all :p
I like having my make/build commands, make it easier to replicate stuff in my CI/CD pipelines.What do you mean? MacOS has tons of open source components, and lots of documentation on booting other systems, those were even used by the Asahi team.
They do not distribute drivers for other system, nor have public documentation for most of its hardware, but that applies to lots of other hardware as well.
On Linux you more often than not do not have access to hardware documentation either.
I'd not mind a macbook if I could run proton on it.
This is why Asahi, trying to get vulkan running on M series hardware, is so exciting.
I doubt it, but we'll see I guess.
The Apple isn't perfect but it sure ain't as bad as some seem to think. ;)