Asahi Linux, a Linux distro designed for use on Apple MacBook computers with Apple Silicon chips, has just integrated a pack of tools and emulators that will allow its users to play AAA video games on Apple hardware.
This was recently announced by Alyssa Rosenzweig, part of the Asahi graphics drivers team, in her blog: “We are excited to launch our Asahi gaming toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows support. In addition, it has an extra: compatibility with OpenCL 3.0″.
“Asahi Linux now includes the only OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan compatible drivers for this hardware. As for the games… although today’s version is an alpha version, Control [el videojuego] “It works well!” explains Rosenzweig.
The news, which is already echoed by the Hacker News forum, represents a new advance in the compatibility of Linux environments with top-level video games, those of the AAA type, characterized by very demanding graphics that require very good components in a PC, such as a powerful graphics card and processor.
In fact, knowing that the macOS operating system is not at all optimized for playing video games, it is possible that gamers will obtain better performance using Asahi Linux than with macOS itself, yes, having one of the models with 16GB of RAM. Some of the games that could be uploaded to Asahi are Fallout 4, Cyberpunk 207, Control, The Witcher 3 or Ghostrunner.
How did they achieve it?
The developer explains in its blog how they have complemented the various drivers, emulators and controllers to turn Asahi Linux into a gaming beast for Mac computers.
“The games are typically Windows x86 binaries rendered with DirectX, while we are targeting Arm Linux with Vulkan. We need to handle every difference: FEX emulates x86 on Arm, Wine translates Windows to Linux, DXVK and vkd3d-proton translate DirectX to Vulkan,” he details. However, he comments that they faced a great challenge, the page size (the blocks of virtual memory used by each operating system). “This is a problem: x86 expects 4K pages, but Apple systems use 16K pages,” he explains.
They have solved this using small virtual machines: “We run games inside a small virtual machine using muvm, passing through devices such as the GPU and game controllers. The hardware is happy because the system is 16K, the game is happy because the virtual machine is 4K and you are happy because you can play Fallout 4″, writes the programmer.
They have also used Tessellation to provide 3D realism, geometry shaders and improved robustness.
Install the pack
If you are an Asahi Linux user on a laptop or Mac computer with an M1 chip, you can install these updates as follows:
- First, install Fedora Asahi Remix.
- Once installed, get the latest drivers with dnf upgrade –refresh && reboot.
- Then install dnf install steam and play.
- While all M1/M2 series systems work, most games require 16GB of memory due to emulation overhead.
