Latest Asahi Linux Brings AAA Windows Games to Apple M1 MacBooks With Intricate Graphics Driver and Translation Stack

While Apple laptops have never really been the first stop for PC gaming, Linux is slowly shaping up to be an excellent gaming platform, largely thanks to open-source development efforts as well as work from the likes of AMD and NVIDIA, who have both put significant work into their respective Linux drivers in recent years. This makes efforts like the Asahi Linux Project all the more intriguing. Asahi Linux is a project that aims to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs—a task that has proven rather difficult, thanks to the intricacies of developing a bespoke GPU driver for Apple’s custom ARM GPUs. In a recent blog post, the graphics developer behind the Asahi Linux Project showed off a number of AAA games, albeit older titles, running on an Apple M1 processor on the latest Asahi Linux build.

To run the games on Apple Silicon, Asahi Linux uses a “game playing toolkit,” which relies on a number of custom graphics drivers and emulators, including tools from Valve’s Proton translation layer, which ironically was also the foundation for Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit. Asahi uses FEX to emulate x86 on ARM, Wine as a translation layer for Windows apps, and DXVK and vkd3d-proton for DirectX-Vulkan translation. In the blog post, the Asahi developer claims that the alpha is capable of running games like Control, The Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 at playable frame rates. Unfortunately, 60 FPS is not yet attainable in the majority of new high-fidelity games, there are a number of indie titles that run quite well on Asahi Linux, including Hollow Knight, Ghostrunner, and Portal 2.

Amusingly, the custom driver used by Asahi Linux is the only driver currently available for Apple Silicon that conforms to OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan APIs. Gaming, of course, isn’t the only focus for Asahi Linux, and the team has already started implementing general purpose x86 emulation to Asahi Linux for more generalist and workstation workloads. Asahi Linux is based on Fedora 40, and ships by default with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, and it has support for all manner of Mac computers with M1 through M2 Pro and M2 Max SoCs, with varying degrees of hardware support. The distribution is freely available to download on the Asahi Linux homepage for anyone wanting to try it out—be sure to check out the support matrix to know what hardware is and isn’t supported, since it is still an alpha, and there may be issues with audio, certain ports, and features like Touch ID.