If you are a user of Asahi Linux, a project launching in 2022, and you want to play Windows titles on a Mac equipped with an M1, M2 or M3 chip, there is good news. The Asahi Linux project has made progress, including becoming compatible with OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 on Macs with an Apple Silicon processor, marking a major step forward for gamers.
Linux is capable of prowess on Mac
On the official blog, Alyssa Rosenzweig reveals that compliant drivers for OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan are now available. These drivers allow certain games to be played through the Asahi Gaming Toolkit, which uses Vulkan 1.3, combined with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility.
Linux gaming on M1 is here! We’re excited to release our Asahi Gaming Toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility. With the added bonus of OpenCL 3.0 compliance.
However, to run Windows games on an M1/M2/M3 Mac with Asahi Linux, the Windows x86 binaries (using DirectX) must be translated to run on Linux with the Vulkan API. This involves a multitude of translation to make the games playable, but the results are already promising. Games like Control, Fallout 4 Or Ghostrunner can run under Asahi Linux, even if the performance is not yet optimal, especially for recent AAA titles.
The project first sought to prove that games could be run correctly, even if the fluidity was not yet there. Independent games, especially 2D platforms like Hollow Knightare already running quite well. However, the majority of games do not reach 60 FPS (frames per second), the threshold often considered smooth.
To achieve these results, Asahi Linux uses tools such as FEX (for x86 emulation), Wine (for DirectX calls), as well as DXVK And vkd3d-Proton to translate DirectX into Vulkan, the API used by Apple on its recent computers.
Note that while sparse texturing is the next step for Honeykrisp, the only Vulkan 1.3 driver for Apple hardware, which will unlock more DX12 games. But the alpha version already runs DX12 games that don’t require sparse textures, like Cyberpunk 2077.
Despite all this good news, the developers point out that the GPU of the M1 chips still poses hardware limitations, because it does not have all the geometry processing functionalities of the GPUs used in PCs, thus requiring software emulation.
Not for everyone
The project is a feat of developers who have worked hard to make Linux work well on the Apple Silicon architecture. Although this is a successful new step, it is not easy to implement, which reserves this solution for the most experienced. A PC is still the best for running PC games. But the Mac is gradually gaining market share by attracting major studios like Ubisoft, Capcom and more.
The latest stable version of Asahi Linux is 6.11.2-1 on Github.
