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.

Rosenzweig's post shows off screenshots of Control, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Ghostrunner, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal 2, and Hollow Knight, though as she notes, most of these games won't run at anywhere near 60 frames per second yet.

"Correctness comes first. Performance improves next," she writes.

The work on Asahi's Vulkan and OpenGL drivers is particularly impressive because Apple's own graphics drivers for macOS don't support most of these APIs. Apple's deprecated-but-not-removed OpenGL support tops out at version 4.1, the same level it's been since 2013, the year before Apple introduced the first version of its proprietary Metal graphics API.

Rosenzweig published her first Vulkan 1.3-conformant version of the Asahi GPU driver, codenamed Honeykrisp, back in April, and since then she's added additional extensions required to support the DXVK translation layer. Some of these extensions have required emulating hardware features that the M-series GPUs don't support natively. The Asahi driver has also added support for OpenCL 3.0.

The new driver and game compatibility is available in current Fedora Asahi Remix distros as an alpha, with a 1.0 release coming at some point down the line. It will run on M1- and M2-series Macs—Asahi doesn't support M3 systems yet, as the team works to improve support for M1 and M2 Macs—and Rosenzweig says that most games will require 16GB of RAM "due to emulation overhead." But even with the current list of caveats, that games written for x86 Windows PCs can run on Arm Linux Macs is a huge technical achievement and a sign of how far Linux and all of these app and API translation layers have come.

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