Asahi Linux’s bespoke GPU driver is running Windows games on Apple Silicon Macs
Work on Asahi’s Vulkan GPU driver and various translation layers is paying off.
A few years ago, the idea of running PC games on a Mac, in Linux, or on Arm processors would have been laughable. But the developers behind Asahi Linux—the independent project that is getting Linux working on Apple Silicon Macs—have managed to do all three of these things at once.
The feat brings together a perfect storm of open source projects, according to Asahi Linux GPU lead Alyssa Rosenzweig: the FEX project to translate x86 CPU code to Arm, the Wine project to get Windows binaries running on Linux, DXVK and the Proton project to translate DirectX 12 API calls into Vulkan API calls, and of course the Asahi project’s Vulkan-conformant driver for Apple’s graphics hardware.
Games are technically run inside a virtual machine because of differences in how Apple Silicon and x86 systems address memory—Apple’s systems use 16 KB memory pages, while x86 systems use 4 KB pages, something that causes issues for Asahi and some other Arm Linux distros on a regular basis and a gap that the VM bridges.