The future looks bright for those who love Apple hardware but not necessarily the company’s software. The project Asahi for Linux has come a long way in its efforts to build full compatibility with all components of Apple’s ARM-based Mac computers.
In April, the first Vulkan 1.3-compatible driver for Apple’s GPU chips was released, and now several Vulkan extensions needed to emulate DirectX with DXVK and VKD3D have also been added. Since Apple’s GPU chips do not have built-in features that match everything found in chips from AMD and Nvidia, the developer Alyssa Rosenzweig had to write shadowprograms that report these activities. With the help of other developers, this has also led to Linux on ARM-based Macs now supporting OpenCL 3.0.
The Vulkan driver is bundled in the official Fedora Asahi Remix distribution with additional compatibility layers to be able to play Windows games. FEX emulates x86 code on an ARM processor, Wine translates Windows APIs to the Linux equivalent, and DXVK/VKD3D translates DirectX to Vulkan. In addition, the entire package runs in a virtual machine because Apple processors allocate memory in 16KB chunks, while x86 processors expect 4KB.
As a result, games such as Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Ghostrunner and Portal 2 can now be played. The only problem is that a model with 16 GB of working memory is required, since the emulation itself takes up a lot of memory. And the developers have focused on maximum compatibility first, so it’s not that fast yet.
Don’t lose it A large forum thread on Asahi Linuxinitiated by @Pulver!
2024-10-13 18:13:00
#Mac #users #play #Windows #games #Linux
