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AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

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Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#331

Post by johnfernow »

pjmlp wrote: post #300
sandworm101 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Running Windows games on top, which will work until it doesn't.

What do you foresee not working in the future?

If future versions of Proton break compatibility with older Windows apps, you can use different old versions of Proton for individual games. Steam makes this very easy on Linux, but rarely is it necessary.

I don't foresee many Linux distros breaking compatibility with Wine, which is good, as some devs argue Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux. [1]

I don't foresee legal issues either, as Wine has been around for 31 years, and its corporate sponsors have included Google in the past. I've seen no indication that the project is on shaky legal grounds.

Microsoft could always create a new API that Wine doesn't yet support, but good luck getting developers to use it -- they've tried many times, but not much has stuck, and most devs just stick with Win32. [2]

1. https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36060678

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#332

Post by jakogut »

echoangle wrote: post #316
vundercind wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh damn I got the order on those mixed up. Was probably thinking of CS Source. Regardless, point stands: they hate the number 3.

They’re probably doing it on purpose as a joke at this point.

It would have to be, CS2 is the fourth major installment in the Counter-Strike franchise.

Then again, all kinds of companies take liberties with naming including numbers. Look at Windows 7 (12th major release), Windows 10 (successor to Windows 8), the game Battlefield 2 (third in the series), Battlefield 3 (three games after BF2), Battlefield 1 (after the release of BF4), etc.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#333

Post by p_l »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #136
kelnos wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they don't care. They've decided that Metal is The One True Way to write 3D-accelerated apps on macOS, so they only implement the things in hardware that Metal requires.

Maybe, but we got here because I asked "is it possible that Apple doesn't want to support Vulkan (in software) because they don't want to support the features it needs (in hardware)." If the reason they don't support it in hardware is because they don't want to support it in software, then the logic gets a bit circular. I'm interested in which came first, or if it's a little of both.

Vulkan very much is designed to give flexibility to hardware vendors. Where abstractions do paper over differences it's generally where it makes the abstraction cheap in runtime but you might take more code vs. less code but requiring a feature that would be otherwise optional (for example some of the complex pipeline manipulation Vs bindless)

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#334

Post by 1-more »

inputError wrote: post #71
dcchambers wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! I wasn't aware, but that actually gives me a ton of confidence that Valve isn't ignoring ARM with all of their Linux + Proton work. Her output is incredible.

Alyssa rules. We all love Alyssa.

I see cats writing software _with hardly any documentation_ like this and my brain melts. Power level strictly monotonic, possibly exponential, and very very large. Bravissima!

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#335

Post by coconut08 »

nottorp wrote: post #291
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…

How well do soulsbornes run on windows anyway? My strong conviction is that From is pretty much technically inept when it comes to Windows ports so I just play their titles on console... An emulated title that is in itself a not so great port will have trouble ofc...

it works on asahi without issue. that is with x86 to arm translation, directx to vulkan translation, windows to linux translation and 4k page to 16k page translation running in a virtual machine.

as for how well fromsoft games run on windows you might have been right 12 years ago when dark souls 1 came out initially. it was a mess at the time, but souls games have been running just fine on windows(and linux for that matter) for years. it's only on macos that it is a mess. this has nothing to do with fromsoft and everything to do with macos.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#336

Post by outworlder »

GeekyBear wrote: post #160
wsc981 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cause MoltenVK [1] is used, I think. --- [1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

Not really. PC games use DirectX as their graphics API, so you need something that can translate from DirectX to the native graphics API your OS is running. On MacOS you'd be translating from DirectX to Metal and Apple provides the emulation software (D3DMetal) as part of the Game Porting Toolkit. On a Steam Deck, Proton uses Vulkan on Linux as the native graphics API, so in that case you are translating from DirectX…

> PC games use DirectX as their graphics API

You are forgetting the increasing number of titles targeting Vulkan directly.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#337

Post by homebrewer »

talldayo wrote: post #280
pjmlp wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Just ignore the guy, it's essentially the reverse of "I run Arch BTW". Not just about Valve or Proton, but about pretty much every FOSS technology that's celebrated here.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#338

Post by GeekyBear »

outworlder wrote: post #336
GeekyBear wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. PC games use DirectX as their graphics API, so you need something that can translate from DirectX to the native graphics API your OS is running. On MacOS you'd be translating from DirectX to Metal and Apple provides the emulation software (D3DMetal) as part of the Game Porting Toolkit. On a Steam Deck, Proton uses Vulkan on Linux as the native graphics API, so in that case you are translating from DirectX…

> PC games use DirectX as their graphics API You are forgetting the increasing number of titles targeting Vulkan directly.

That is an extremely niche use case on Windows.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#339

Post by homebrewer »

kbolino wrote: post #313
pjmlp wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they are, to the extent they depend on Microsoft technologies for the games that run on Proton.

As far as I am aware, neither Valve nor the independent Wine/Proton developers are bound by any licensing agreements with Microsoft. They are clean-room implementing the same technologies, but they are not beholden to Microsoft in any legal way. Of course, drastic changes in laws or policy regimes could alter this dynamic, but those are out-of-context risks. In order for Microsoft to rug-pull the technology (which is…

They can restrict .NET and the C++ stdlibs so that you can only run them under Windows (through a license change or by introducing a code check), but if they hadn't done that in Ballmer days, I don't think they will now.

Re: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

#340

Post by GeekyBear »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #242
GeekyBear wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emulation has unavoidable overhead. For instance, Alyssa mentions in this post that most emulated games will need at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum. In addition, native ARM games on MacOS don't have the additional overhead of emulating a different CPU architecture and Graphics API. However, that doesn't take away from this emulated support being an amazing achievement.

> most emulated games will need at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum That's because the RAM is shared with the GPU and most of these games would require a GPU with at least 2-4GB on top of the normal system requirement to have at least 8GB. So, 8GB of RAM would be cutting it close on a mac since part of that would have to be sacrificed for the GPU.

Alyssa lays out the reasoning in the linked blog post.

They are running emulated games in their own separate virtual machine, because Intel games expect a 4k page size and the OS is running with a 16k page size.

Virtual Machines require their own chunk if memory overhead, so the resource usage can't help being higher than a native MacOS game's would be.

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