Asahi Lina (朝日リナ) // nullptr::live (@lina@vt.social)
vt.social
Attached: 1 image ✨ 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 the classic WineD3D on our OpenGL 4.6 driver! 🤯 Watch the stream: ▶️ https://youtube.com/live/JT9a_MrFV18
    • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
      39·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • ReallyZen@lemmy.mlOP
      13·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
      8·
      6 months ago

      You’ve gotten a lot of answers (mostly no), but I will say Minecraft runs better on Linux on Mac than MacOS on Mac!

    • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • NutWrench@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 months ago

        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.

        • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Sorry I was very unclear. Whisky is an app for MacOS. I’ve used Steam on Ubuntu as well and it works OK but sometimes is a pain to find a version of proton that works for a given game.

        • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
          2·
          6 months ago

          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.

    • imikoy [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      910·
      6 months ago

      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.

  • DefederateLemmyMlEnglish
    381·
    6 months ago

    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?

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      39·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
      630·
      6 months ago

      Why not click the link and find out? It’s literally a Mastodon post, you don’t even have to read much.

      • DefederateLemmyMlEnglish
        352·
        6 months ago

        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.

        • nxdefiant@startrek.website
          2·
          6 months ago

          Man ,idk why everyone is being a dick to you. A MicroVM is a virtual machine that only emulates a small subset of an entire OS (a container basically). FEX is an x86 emulator. So yes, this is emulation.

          • DefederateLemmyMl
            1·
            6 months ago

            Thanks.

            FEX is an x86 emulator

            So my real question is really about this: common wisdom is that emulating a whole CPU architecture is a performance killer. Does that apply here, and are they just running games that can take the hit? Or phrased differently: given that it’s emulated, could this ever have near-native (CPU) performance, or nah?

            • nxdefiant@startrek.website
              1·
              6 months ago

              Probably not, but it might be good enough. I’m not an expert in architecture emulation by any stretch, but it might work best for older games where modern performance is a non issue either way.

        • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          To answer your question, I’m sure for the x86_64(not separate things btw) specific code it might use some sort of emulator or a translation layer. Idk WTF “microVM with FEX” is, maybe that’s it?

          But for the DX11 part, that’s just the normal DirectX to Vulkan/OpenGL translation layer e.g. WineD3D.
          There’s actually nothing that special about DirectX on ARM, it’s the same API. The translation layer just takes those API calls from DirectX11 and translates them to the equivalent in OpenGL, and then the Asahi Linux OpenGL driver takes of actually executing those commands on the GPU.

        • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
          630·
          6 months ago

          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?

        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          237·
          6 months ago

          You can Google the words you don’t know, and find out that it does in fact answer your question.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    8·
    6 months ago

    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.