Update : more games!
is linux already better for gaming on macs than macos?
As an actual M1+Asahi user and a gamer: Asahi is not there yet. Right now, if you’re on macOS, Crossover (or Porting Kit) and/or Parallels is able to run more games and with better performance compared to Asahi (using krun + FEX). Also, Steam on macOS (non-native) is much more peformant compared to Asahi, where it’s currently slow and glitchy.
But that will all change in the future once the Vulkan driver and TSO patches are ready. FEX is also seeing a lot of improvements, so by the end of the year, there’s a good chance that gaming on Asahi would be much better than macOS.
You can use Whisky which is a convenient wrapper for WINE to run the Windows version of Steam. Simple games like Dredge work flawlessly on my M1 but anything used for benchmarking FPS is unacceptably slow. Translation of Intel code is the biggest issue. I assume Asahi has the same limitations as Mac OS but it is impressive what they’ve been able to do.
There’s a native Linux version of Steam (at least for Ubuntu / Mint) that works great. It also uses a proprietary Wine wrapper called Proton, that’s pre-configured for all your Steam Library games.
Native in this case means processor architecture, not OS. The Linux Steam is still x86/x86_64 code and to run it on an ARM system (even running Linux) will require an emulation layer. This adds substantial amounts of overhead, much more than Wine/Proton does for Windows games on Linux.
If the game relies on 32bit libraries, IIRC macos dropped the support for those? And there’s a lot of games that rely on 32bit.
So if one really cannot play 32bit games on macos then yeah. If the game doesn’t do anything fancy with OpenGL, and is using OpenGL, then I think that it’ll run great.
No Vulkan and just WineD3D on OpenGL makes it hard to consider good. Might be pretty good after they find a way to run Vulkan on it, which might be tricky given how the hardware was explicitly designed to run just the proprietary Metal API.
A vulkan driver already exists and has made progress, it just needs some more time.
I’ve heard something about Apple Silicon GPUs being tile-based and not immediate mode, which means the Vulkan API is different compared to regular PCs. How has this been addressed in the Vulkan driver?
I’m still in shock how quickly they have progressed.
So how does that work given that most Steam games are x86/x64 and the M2 is an ARM processor? Does it emulate an x86 CPU? Isn’t that slow, given that it’s an entirely different architecture, or is there some kind of secret sauce?
Emulation.
Definitely going to incur a performance hit relative to native code, but in principle it could be perfectly good. It’s not like the GPU is running x86 code in the first place. On macOS, Apple provides Rosetta to run x86 Mac apps, and it’s very, very good. Not sure how FEX compares.
Why not click the link and find out? It’s literally a Mastodon post, you don’t even have to read much.
The post doesn’t answer the questions, it’s why I asked.
It says:
All running on a krun microVM with FEX and full TSO support 💪
I was not expecting Party Animals to run! That’s a DX11 game, running with the classic WineD3D on our OpenGL 4.6 driver!
Now I know some of these words, but it does not answer my question.
You asked how it works, the post states how it works. You also asked if it’s slow, which is clearly answered in the post (though you didn’t quote that part). You also asked if there’s some “secret sauce” allowing it to be fast, which is also a weird question since everything used is listed in the post.
If something wasn’t clear to you, why not specifically ask about it? Even in this comment, you still don’t specify what you don’t understand. What kind of answer are you expecting to get?
You can Google the words you don’t know, and find out that it does in fact answer your question.
She’s the GOAT
I’ve always thought GOAT stands for Gentleman Of All Trades. I make a wild guess it’s Girl Of All Trades in this case?
The Gods be damned it can run Crysis
