The future looks bright for those who like Apple hardware but not necessarily the company's software. Project Asahi Linux It has come a long way in its efforts to build full compatibility with all components of Apple's ARM-based Mac computers.
In April, the first Vulkan 1.3 compatible driver for Apple's GPU chips was released, and now a number of Vulkan extensions required for DirectX emulation with DXVK and VKD3D have been added. Since Apple's GPU chips don't have built-in features that match everything found in AMD and Nvidia's chips, the developer was Alyssa Rosenzweig He had to write shadingPrograms that simulate these functions. With the help of other developers, this also led to Linux on ARM-based Macs now supporting OpenCL 3.0.
The Vulkan driver is integrated into the official Fedora Asahi Remix distribution with additional compatibility layers for you to play Windows games. FEX emulates x86 code on an ARM processor, Wine translates Windows APIs into Linux equivalents, and DXVK/VKD3D translates DirectX into Vulkan. Additionally, the entire package runs in a virtual machine because Apple processors allocate memory in 16KB chunks, while x86 processors expect 4KB.
The result is that games like Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Ghostrunner, and Portal 2 are now playable. The only problem is that it requires a model with 16GB of working memory, because the simulation itself consumes a lot of memory. The developers focused on maximum compatibility first, so it's not that fast yet.
Don't miss the big Asahi Linux forum thread started by @Pulver!
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