AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

From a performance and technical perspective this is incredible. Well done!

It will never happen, but my dream is for the Asahi devs, Valve, and Apple to all get together to build out a cross-platform Proton to emulate and play games built for Windows on both x86 and ARM hardware running Linux.

A Steam Deck with the performance and power efficiency of an M-series ARM chip and the entire library of games that run on Proton is just...dreamy.

> Tessellation enables games like The Witcher 3 to generate geometry. The M1 has hardware tessellation, but it is too limited for DirectX, Vulkan, or OpenGL. We must instead tessellate with arcane compute shaders

> Geometry shaders are an older, cruder method to generate geometry. Like tessellation, the M1 lacks geometry shader hardware so we emulate with compute.

Is this potentially a part of why Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan themselves? Because they don't want to implement common Vulkan features in hardware, which leads to less than ideal performance?

(I realize performance is still relatively fast in practice, which is awesome!)

I’m just blown away at all the work they’re able to do with a platform that they basically reverse engineered. I’m glad to be contributing to their efforts. I’m also waiting for when M3 support comes! Such a cool group of engineers and hackers. I love it.

This is super cool.

So, wait, does this mean that gaming is better on Linux, on a Mac?

The M-series chips from Apple have some special hardware to help emulate x86 with near-native performance, right? I wonder if they take advantage of those features (actually I forget exactly what the features were).

I mean this is an incredible achievement either way. Everything is emulated, but they are still running AAA games. Wow.

Incredible work. May I also interest you in retrowin32 https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32/blob/main/README.md

Which is an attempt to collapse the stack so that fewer translation and virtualisation stages are needed.

Fantastic! A great proof of concept on Linux - lots of AAA gaming is already possible on Mac with Crossover and/or Parallels or VMWare Personal, which is free! While I have a Steam Deck, gaming on Mac works for me - I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller.

I'm slightly confused after reading about page alignment. Why would a 16k page be less aligned than a 4k page causing assumptions about pointers within those pages to break? The 4k pages on x86 are aligned on 4k boundaries, are the 16k pages on M1 aligned on <4k boundaries?

Realisticly speaking, is Asahi Linux usable right now for a random schmuck who just wants to use his computer?

May I use this space to ask the question: is the M3 substantially different from the M1 and M2 that it is not supported?

For people like me who have been using Ashai for a while but are not Fedora natives; TIL `sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=40; sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot` is necessary first as the normal upgrades left me on 39.

I think at the moment, this is probably the only way to feasibly game on a Mac. Crossover and other Wine-based apps as well as Parallels are... not really truly possible. If you bought the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2021 with M1 Max and tried to play anything reasonably modern on it, you'd find the performance is basically not playable .

I see that they're using FEX, what about box86? Is it comparable in term of performance?

I think my favorite little bit from the article is that they’re using a VM to “fix“ the page size differences between macOS and Windows.

What an ingenious idea.

I’d be curious to know how it compares to gaming on macOS with Game porting toolkit.

Does this mean we're closer to getting GPU support on Docker on Apple devices?

I'm a little sad that this has seemingly taken precedence over all other hardware support. M3 support, dp-alt mode, making the microphone work are all things that I was hoping were going to land in the past year.

all I need is DP alt mode and I'm switching!

Nice so is this full Linux possibly running on an iPad, or just desk top?

Wish NixOS (or at least Arch) were supported on the level that Fedora is

can i play black myth wukong with it?

This makes me think of the classic clip of George Carlin telling a joke about the difference between heaven and hell [1].

Is there a modern equivalent with FAANG, Microsoft, Sony, Valve, etc.?

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR8xPC4NEro

I noticed the URL was updated for this post. Previously it linked to asahilinux.org which showed an anti-HN manifesto from the HN referral. Curious as I haven’t seen this before. Seems it has been covered by previous commenters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36227103

Thank you

    Alyssa Rosenzweig
    Asahi Lina
    chaos_princess
    Davide Cavalca
    Dougall Johnson
    Ella Stanforth
    Faith Ekstrand
    Janne Grunau
    Karol Herbst
    marcan
    Mary Guillemard
    Neal Gompa
    Sergio López
    TellowKrinkle
    Teoh Han Hui
    Rob Clark
    Ryan Houdek

Marcan and asahi Lina are the same person.

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Yeah yeah great, now please m3 support, or maybe before that support for internal mic and external displays/dp-alt. Pretty please? (Not complaining happy about any progress)

If only I had "canapplesiliconemulatewindowsgames.com"!

Where's the real inspiration for Asahi, Fandaniel in FFXIV?

I still wonder why valve is that much reluctant at porting its proton stuff into the simple and plain C99 of wine/vkd3d.

It is shocking the effort required to have a good gaming experience on Apple computers (excluding iOS). They always struck me as agnostic to games, yet in recent years it appears to border on open hostility.

Ok, but why would a hardcore Linux person want to play games that embody everything they hate about Windows in their mode of production, data gathering practices, politics, etc?