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AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

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Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#281

Post by jakogut »

vundercind wrote: post #272
lucasban wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean Steam Deck 2 or 3 would be impossible?

Steamdeck 3 being statistically impossible is a joke about Valve having an aversion to releasing a #3 of anything. Half life 1, 2… hm. Ok we’ll make three HL2 episodes to follow that up. Ep I. Ep II. Uhhhh… and let’s stop there, just like forever I guess. Portal 1. Portal 2. Left4dead. L4D2. Team Fortress. TF2. Counterstrike. CS2. Oh shit we’re releasing a third one, we might have to use the number three finally, oh…

Also, the successor to CS:Go is...Counter-Strike 2.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#282

Post by WD-42 »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #240
WD-42 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is going to do the same thing they did with BSD, WebKit, etc. They will wait until proton is mature enough, fork it, then release it as their own. Why put in the effort this early on?

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

Which is exactly what I described. Looks like they took crossover/wine and added some custom patches. What are the chances they upstream anything? Probably 0.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#283

Post by jayd16 »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #183
jayd16 wrote: post #145

This makes me think of the classic clip of George Carlin telling a joke about the difference between heaven and hell [1]. Is there a modern equivalent with FAANG, Microsoft, Sony, Valve, etc.? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR8xPC4NEro

In heaven, Microsoft is in charge of gaming, Amazon does the customer service, Apple is responsible for privacy, Facebook does the UI, and everyone works at Google. In hell, Apple is in charge of gaming, Google does the customer service, Facebook is responsible for privacy, Microsoft does the UI, and everyone works at Amazon.

This is good but the punchline needs to be punchier.

I do like the implication that were working in the warehouse and not AWS but maybe it's too subtle.

You might also be able to do something with the surprise switch from Linux to Linus. In heaven code is reviewed on GitHub [...], in hell [...] a nd your code is reviewed by Linus.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#284

Post by WD-42 »

pmarreck wrote: post #256
WD-42 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is going to do the same thing they did with BSD, WebKit, etc. They will wait until proton is mature enough, fork it, then release it as their own. Why put in the effort this early on?

Apple literally already has released a game porting toolkit which is basically Proton (see sibling reply)

Which is crossover/wine with custom patches.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apple/homebrew-apple/refs/...

0 chance they upstream anything. So in a way they are already benefitting from valves work.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#285

Post by talldayo »

psd1 wrote: post #268
KeplerBoy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the chips really fundamentally better than their AMD and Intel counterparts made on the same node? Sure it's a great design, but I believe x86-64 will catch up once again now with everyone using TSMC.

Arm has had a performance-to-power edge over x86 since inception. AIUI, if you want the most flops per die, you'll buy x86 - probably the 128-core Xeon for enterprise money. But that's not what's best for hand-held gaming. AAA titles are typically GPU-bound anyway. More CPU flops may not offer much benefit.

> AAA titles are typically GPU-bound anyway. More CPU flops may not offer much benefit.

Yes, but actually no. The Steam Deck is playing at extremely low resolutions. Rendering at 720p and 30fps is (on paper) 8x less demanding on the GPU than rendering a native 1440p60 experience. You can fully get by without having a powerful dGPU, which is why the Steam Deck is really able to play so many titles on a weak iGPU.

The problem is translation. Cyberpunk 2077 runs fine on a 25 watt mobile chip that uses x86, which is why the Deck even costs less than $1000 in the first place. If you try to put a mobile ARM CPU in that same position and wattage, it's not going to translate game code fast enough unless you have custom silicon speeding it up. There's really no reason for Valve to charge extra for a custom ARM design when COTS x86 chips like AMD's would outperform it.

For x86 PC games (which pretty much all games are, today), ARM is at a substantial disadvantage, period. The IPC and efficiency advantages are entirely lost when you have to spend extra CPU cycles emulating AVX with NEON constantly. If there were ARM-native games on Windows then things might be different, but for today's landscape I just don't see how ISA translation is better than native.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#286

Post by whimsicalism »

pxc wrote: post #232
whimsicalism wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet how do i install this gaming support on nixos?

You'd have to package FEX :D For the kind of person who wants to run NixOS on Apple Silicon or do Linux gaming on Apple Silicon in the first place, that's probably interesting and not too hard but if you're allergic to that, you might be able to figure something else out with Box64, which is already packaged in Nixpkgs x86_64 gaming on NixOS is of course well supported and has been for a long time. There's a 'native'…

we are talking about asahi linux. i think it is pretty clear that nixos isn’t supported like a first class citizen because you have to do a fair bit of work to make all of the more recent userspace fixes work on NixOS. i run NixOS Asahi so I know.

it was easier when Arch was a first class citizen but the advice nowadays you get upon encountering a problem on Arch is to switch to Fedora

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#287

Post by WD-42 »

simonh wrote: post #200
WD-42 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is going to do the same thing they did with BSD, WebKit, etc. They will wait until proton is mature enough, fork it, then release it as their own. Why put in the effort this early on?

They won’t do anything to undermine Metal.

No but it looks like they’ll add Metal support to Wine, do the bare minimum to comply with the license and release it as “Apple game toolkit”. Textbook.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#288

Post by coconut08 »

dagmx wrote: post #193
coconut08 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i haven't tested it extensively but i tried dark souls 2 on parallels and there were vertex explosions making it unplayable, using crossover and whisky it was a jittery laggy mess. after seeing alyssa's talk i decided to load up asahi and it ran perfectly max resolution 60 fps locked. gaming on macos in my experience has been unplayable to the point where i gave up even trying. after my experience with ds2 i think th…

What backend did you use? You get very different results if it defaults to MoltenVK versus d3dmetal DS2 comes in both DX9 and DX11 flavours. The latter should work better with d3dmetal and is more comparable to what proton is doing.

i never tried to change between dx9 and 11 in parallels or crossover/whisky since i didn't know that was possible, so i was using whatever is default. that said i tried messing with all of the wine settings and it didn't seem to make a difference. i even messed with stuff like esync and msync (or whatever they were).

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#289

Post by seabrookmx »

sylware wrote: post #215

I still wonder why valve is that much reluctant at porting its proton stuff into the simple and plain C99 of wine/vkd3d.

Likely because their engineers are more productive in C++?

Modern C++ with move semantics is a lot more easy to reason about and memory safe than C99, IMO.

Since it's a greenfield project, they didn't have to worry about the nasty baggage of legacy C++ spaghetti that kills most projects.

Just because you prefer "simple" C99 doesn't mean they do :)

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#290

Post by sandworm101 »

pjmlp wrote: post #276
scheeseman486 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine and DXVK are already running on Android and they play Windows games with the rendering and computational complexity of Fallout 4 at playable framerates on many of the latest smartphone SoCs. It's still WIP, but it's already gone beyond proof of concept, people are using them. Valve don't need the developers to be on-board in order to run their games on anything else, that's why Proton exists. What Valve want is…

It looks more like how to avoid paying Windows licenses for the SteamDeck to me.

Close, but the root is more nuanced. Once upon a time, Microsoft was talking about regulating "apps" on windows like Apple does for the iPhone. Valve saw the writing on the wall: a potential ban on violent or otherwise adult-themed games. So Valve started the steambox project. Get the games running on linux/WINE and they could tell Microsoft to push off. Years later, we have the steamdeck as a revolutionary product and linux is the go-to OS for portable gaming.
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