Developers Demonstrate AAA Windows Gaming on M1 and M2 Macs Using Linux

Yesterday, developer Alyssa Rosenzweig gave a talk at the XDC conference in Montréal, Canada about gaming on Asahi Linux installed on M1 and M2 Apple silicon-based Macs. According to GamingOnLinux:

They announced their “Asahi game playing toolkit” which brings together their Vulkan 1.3 graphics driver with, and x86 emulation with Windows game compatibility. It’s all still “Alpha” level quality, but good enough to run some AAA games now. Unlike Apple’s own macOS, Asahi Linux has the only conformant OpenGL®, OpenCL™, and Vulkan® drivers for this hardware (as Apple focus on their own API - Metal).

With Asahi Linux installed on your Mac and at least 16GB of memory to handle emulation overhead, Rosenzweig explained that demanding games like Control, Fallout 4, and Cyberpunk 2077 are all playable. That said, it’s still early days for the Ashahi game-playing toolkit, with more work to be done to support more modern AAA Windows games running at 60fps.

Still, what Rosenzweig and other contributors to the project have achieved is impressive, with more details available on Rosenzweig’s website. It’s also heartening to see developers coming up with solutions that work with commonly-used Windows graphics APIs instead of waiting for game developers to adopt Apple’s Metal framework.