this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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is linux already better for gaming on macs than macos?
Sure looks like it
As an actual M1+Asahi user and a gamer: Asahi is not there yet. Right now, if you're on macOS, Crossover (or Porting Kit) and/or Parallels is able to run more games and with better performance compared to Asahi (using krun + FEX). Also, Steam on macOS (non-native) is much more peformant compared to Asahi, where it's currently slow and glitchy.
But that will all change in the future once the Vulkan driver and TSO patches are ready. FEX is also seeing a lot of improvements, so by the end of the year, there's a good chance that gaming on Asahi would be much better than macOS.
I'd argue that it may come to that, given the poor availability of (steam) games for the macos platform. And when it is available, you may end up with a disclaimer that it may not run anyway.
You've gotten a lot of answers (mostly no), but I will say Minecraft runs better on Linux on Mac than MacOS on Mac!
You can use Whisky which is a convenient wrapper for WINE to run the Windows version of Steam. Simple games like Dredge work flawlessly on my M1 but anything used for benchmarking FPS is unacceptably slow. Translation of Intel code is the biggest issue. I assume Asahi has the same limitations as Mac OS but it is impressive what they’ve been able to do.
There's a native Linux version of Steam (at least for Ubuntu / Mint) that works great. It also uses a proprietary Wine wrapper called Proton, that's pre-configured for all your Steam Library games.
Sorry I was very unclear. Whisky is an app for MacOS. I’ve used Steam on Ubuntu as well and it works OK but sometimes is a pain to find a version of proton that works for a given game.
Native in this case means processor architecture, not OS. The Linux Steam is still x86/x86_64 code and to run it on an ARM system (even running Linux) will require an emulation layer. Thos adds substantial amounts of overhead, much more than Wine/Proton does for Windows games on Linux.
No Vulkan and just WineD3D on OpenGL makes it hard to consider good. Might be pretty good after they find a way to run Vulkan on it, which might be tricky given how the hardware was explicitly designed to run just the proprietary Metal API.
A vulkan driver already exists and has made progress, it just needs some more time.
I've heard something about Apple Silicon GPUs being tile-based and not immediate mode, which means the Vulkan API is different compared to regular PCs. How has this been addressed in the Vulkan driver?
The blog has multiple progress posts https://asahilinux.org/blog/
I’ll admit im not an expert but shes not brought up tiling at all as a problem.
Yeah, in a Reddit comment, Hector Martin himself said that the memory bandwidth on the Apple SIlicon GPU is so big that any potential performance problems due to TBDR vs IMR are basically insignificant.
...which is a funny fact because I had another Reddit user swear up and down that TBDR was a big problem and that's why Apple decided not to support Vulkan and instead is forcing everyone to go Metal.