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✨ We got a bunch of Steam games to run on Asahi Linux!!! ✨
Most of them run at a solid 60FPS and all of them are playable on my M2 Pro~ 🚀
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 t...
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.
I'd argue that it may come to that, given the poor availability of (steam) games for the macos platform. And when it is available, you may end up with a disclaimer that it may not run anyway.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Asahi means “rising sun” in Japanese, and it is also the name of an apple cultivar. 旭りんご (asahi ringo) is what we know as the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its name.
If you're thinking what I'm thinking, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with beer.
The Asahi team never fails to impress. You can support the project at their Patreon. You don't need to care about Apple hardware to see the value in the work they're doing getting ported over to ARM PCs. Who knows? You might be donating to the health of your preferred distro on a device you will own down the road.