If only I had "canapplesiliconemulatewindowsgames.com"!
AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
171–180 of 382 posts
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand the sentiment. But the people who could work on the Asahi Linux graphics stack are generally not the same as the people who could e.g. bring up Asahi Linux on M3 chips. I would not consider the lack of activity in some Asahi Linux areas to be a conflict of priorities. It is in my opinion mostly a result of these lacking areas naturally attracting less developers capable of moving them forward.
The M3 GPU is a lot different and has a bunch of new features like ray tracing, so the super talented team working on the Asahi Linux graphics stack might have a lot of work ahead of them to support the M3's GPU fully as well. God I wish I was smart enough to help out with Asahi Linux...
Chipping into their Patreon helped me feel at peace with not being smart enough!
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is this potentially a part of why Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan? Because they don't want to implement common Vulkan features in hardware, which leads to less than ideal performance? Yes, it's a big reason. I tried to port the yuzu switch emulator to macos a few years ago, and you end up having to write compute shaders that emulate the geometry shaders to make that work. Even fairly modern games like Mario Od…
Why Apple does not just implement it? They have more resources than anyone in the world. Patents?
Geometry shaders have almost always sucked in all fairness. I'm surprised a game newer than 2015 bothered with them. It's been pretty common knowledge that geometry shaders really only work better on Intel hardware (and I'm not sure how long that lasted).
Tessellation falling short is just classic Apple, though. Shows how much they prioritize games in their decision making, despite every other year deciding they need a AAA game to showcase their hardware.
(apologies for the crude answer. I would genuinely be interested in a technical perspective defending the decision. My only conclusion is that the kind of software their customers need, like art or editing, does not need that much tessellation).
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#174From a performance and technical perspective this is incredible. Well done! It will never happen, but my dream is for the Asahi devs, Valve, and Apple to all get together to build out a cross-platform Proton to emulate and play games built for Windows on both x86 and ARM hardware running Linux. A Steam Deck with the performance and power efficiency of an M-series ARM chip and the entire library of games that run on P…
that's ideally what Vulkan was for. Build for one common open source standard, and then Apple/Microsoft/Google/Linux can all build an API to support that.
But I guess there was never a time when an open graphics standard stood as the leader. Maybe during a brief stint in the Windows Vista era at best.
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's true. M3 has much better idle/near-idle power draw, but actual performance per watt when doing things is pretty close.
No, it’s the other way around. Intel has generally caught up in idle power draw but is still severely behind in performance per watt. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Lunar-Lake-CPU-analysis-... https://youtu.be/ymoiWv9BF7Q
The last I checked, there low wattage AMD and high wattage Apple had similar performance and wattage, so AMD was the right choice for raw performance, and Apple won for portable devices.
Intel was losing badly to one or the other at all TDPs. I don’t get the impression that’s changed much. (Even if it has, I can’t remember the last time I encountered a non-xeon intel machine with working hardware and drivers (for any OS, and I tried Windows, Linux and macs).
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#176Ok, but why would a hardcore Linux person want to play games that embody everything they hate about Windows in their mode of production, data gathering practices, politics, etc?
linux users like to have fun too Also, there are plenty of Windows-only games that aren't subject to those practices. Free games, itch.io games, GOG games, etc. There's a big world out there!
> there are plenty of Windows-only games that aren't subject to those practices. Free games, itch.io games, GOG games, etc. There's a big world out there!
Those games are generally not AAA by definition, and often either already have a Linux build released, run acceptably under traditional emulation, or both.
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#177May I use this space to ask the question: is the M3 substantially different from the M1 and M2 that it is not supported?
[dead]
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is this potentially a part of why Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan? Because they don't want to implement common Vulkan features in hardware, which leads to less than ideal performance? Yes, it's a big reason. I tried to port the yuzu switch emulator to macos a few years ago, and you end up having to write compute shaders that emulate the geometry shaders to make that work. Even fairly modern games like Mario Od…
Why couldn't you just use MoltenVK?
MoltenVK doesn't support geometry shaders for ~3 years now[0]
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#179From a performance and technical perspective this is incredible. Well done! It will never happen, but my dream is for the Asahi devs, Valve, and Apple to all get together to build out a cross-platform Proton to emulate and play games built for Windows on both x86 and ARM hardware running Linux. A Steam Deck with the performance and power efficiency of an M-series ARM chip and the entire library of games that run on P…
An ARM CPU only emulating x86 isn't going to be more efficient than straight x86. ARM is barely more efficient as it is at those performance levels. The real reason Apple is ahead is because they're paying for more expensive more advanced nodes for their CPUs. I you compare CPUs on similar node sizes, you'll see that AMD and Intel are basically caught up architecturally in perf/W metrics.
There is no theoretical reason that is the case. These systems would be transpiling, not interpreting.
Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux
#180Fantastic! A great proof of concept on Linux - lots of AAA gaming is already possible on Mac with Crossover and/or Parallels or VMWare Personal, which is free! While I have a Steam Deck, gaming on Mac works for me - I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller.
truth is macs have such a small market share for gaming that it ain't worth the effort