AAA Linux Gaming on ARM64 Mac Hardware, Now a Reality

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2024-11-19 12:30:05

Things are moving fast for Asahi Linux, the Linux distribution for ARM64-based Macs, and just last month there was a long post from Rosenzweig about the fact that AAA gaming is now at reach on the M1 ARM64 hardware from Apple.

Games are typically x86 Windows binaries that use DirectX for rendering. On the Steam Deck and other x86 based hardware, Proton handles the translation of X86 Windows calls to X86 Linux userspace calls, and the conversion of DirectX calls to Vulkan for the graphics API.

Things are also progressing on the ARM space to make the same kind of translation work across processor architectures. To make this possible on ARM, you need another piece: FEX, or Box64. Since Valve is backing FEX, and the Asahi development, Asahi uses FEX instead of Box64.

There’s one issue when you move to ARM64 architecture on the Mac hardware: page size. The x86 Linux builds expect 4K sized pages, but Apple hardware relies on 16K pages.

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