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

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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] 13 points 1 month ago

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

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