Progress on Asahi’s Vulkan GPU driver and various translation layers is yielding positive results.
A few years back, the very notion of playing PC games on a Mac, running Linux, or utilizing Arm processors seemed utterly ridiculous. However, the dedicated developers of Asahi Linux—the independent initiative that aims to make Linux functional on Apple Silicon Macs—have succeeded in achieving all three tasks simultaneously.
This accomplishment is a result of a remarkable convergence of open source projects, as outlined by Asahi Linux GPU lead Alyssa Rosenzweig: the FEX project for translating x86 CPU code to Arm, the Wine project for executing Windows binaries on Linux, DXVK and the Proton project which convert DirectX 12 API calls into Vulkan API calls, along with the Asahi project’s Vulkan-compliant driver for Apple’s graphics hardware.
Games are technically executed within a virtual machine due to the discrepancies between Apple Silicon and x86 systems in memory addressing—Apple’s architecture utilizes 16 KB memory pages while x86 systems operate on 4 KB pages. This difference presents challenges for Asahi and several other Arm Linux distributions on a frequent basis, a gap that is bridged by the VM.
Rosenzweig’s post features screenshots from Control, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Ghostrunner, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal 2, and Hollow Knight. However, she emphasizes that most of these games currently struggle to achieve 60 frames per second.
“Correctness comes first. Performance improves next,” she states.
The advancements made on Asahi’s Vulkan and OpenGL drivers are noteworthy, especially since Apple’s own graphics drivers for macOS lack support for many of these APIs. Apple’s older OpenGL support, which is still operational but outdated, only goes up to version 4.1, where it has remained since 2013, the year prior to the launch of its proprietary Metal graphics API.
Rosenzweig released her initial Vulkan 1.3-compliant version of the Asahi GPU driver, code-named Honeykrisp, in April, and has since incorporated additional extensions necessary for the DXVK translation layer. Some of these extensions have involved emulating hardware attributes that the M-series GPUs do not inherently support. The Asahi driver has also expanded to include support for OpenCL 3.0.
The latest driver and game compatibility features are currently accessible in the Fedora Asahi Remix distributions, available in an alpha version, with plans for a 1.0 release in the future. This will function on M1 and M2 series Macs, as the team is focused on enhancing support for M1 and M2 Macs; support for M3 systems is not yet available. Rosenzweig notes that most games will need 16GB of RAM “because of emulation overhead.” Despite the current limitations, the ability for games designed for x86 Windows PCs to operate on Arm Linux Macs marks a significant technical milestone and illustrates the progression of Linux, along with the various app and API translation layers that have been developed.
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