this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Asahi Linux’s bespoke GPU driver is running Windows games on Apple Silicon Macs (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago by lemmee_in@lemm.ee to c/linux@programming.dev
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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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[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 37 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks 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.

[–] RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 4 weeks ago

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

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