I played through the entirety of Elden Ring and its DLC on my macbook pro through GPTK which is a pretty modern and demanding game. Don't think that would be possible on asahi.
That’s true, but many titles are 32bit and Apple removed 32 bit support, causing these titles not to run. It’s a real bummer, because there is no technical limitation.
Yes. Haven’t tried those games, but on apple silicon whisky app emulates with gameporting toolkit + wine/proton. For intel silicon I think it was also possible but not sure.
> FTA: "While many games are playable, newer AAA titles don’t hit 60fps yet."
You’re lucky to get 60fps playing a fairly undemanding game on MacOS, even on hardware that is otherwise a dream.
For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 is barely playable on my M3 MacBook Pro at well below native resolution with all settings turned down. It’s a brilliant game but hardly cutting edge graphically.
> most emulated games will need at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum
That's because the RAM is shared with the GPU and most of these games would require a GPU with at least 2-4GB on top of the normal system requirement to have at least 8GB. So, 8GB of RAM would be cutting it close on a mac since part of that would have to be sacrificed for the GPU.
Alyssa lays out the reasoning in the linked blog post.
They are running emulated games in their own separate virtual machine, because Intel games expect a 4k page size and the OS is running with a 16k page size.
Virtual Machines require their own chunk if memory overhead, so the resource usage can't help being higher than a native MacOS game's would be.
No, you’ll still get better performance, more features supported and lower overhead running with Game Porting Toolkit currently.
That includes raytracing support and heterogeneous paging support which are two things Alyssa calls out explicitly herself. Not to mention the VM overhead.
That’s not to say Alyssa’s work is not very impressive. It is. But GPTk is still ahead.
That’s not even including the other aspects of Mac support that Asahi still needs to get to. Again, very impressive work, but the answer to your question is No.
i haven't tested it extensively but i tried dark souls 2 on parallels and there were vertex explosions making it unplayable, using crossover and whisky it was a jittery laggy mess. after seeing alyssa's talk i decided to load up asahi and it ran perfectly max resolution 60 fps locked. gaming on macos in my experience has been unplayable to the point where i gave up even trying. after my experience with ds2 i think that it's going to be significantly better.
i never tried to change between dx9 and 11 in parallels or crossover/whisky since i didn't know that was possible, so i was using whatever is default. that said i tried messing with all of the wine settings and it didn't seem to make a difference. i even messed with stuff like esync and msync (or whatever they were).
it works on asahi without issue. that is with x86 to arm translation, directx to vulkan translation, windows to linux translation and 4k page to 16k page translation running in a virtual machine.
as for how well fromsoft games run on windows you might have been right 12 years ago when dark souls 1 came out initially. it was a mess at the time, but souls games have been running just fine on windows(and linux for that matter) for years. it's only on macos that it is a mess. this has nothing to do with fromsoft and everything to do with macos.
> you might have been right 12 years ago when dark souls 1 came out initially
When it came out initially for windows I had already done two playthroughs so just did ... not ... care. I just read it's a crap port in the news.
> souls games have been running just fine on windows(and linux for that matter) for years
Maybe. For like 4 years I ran my PCs without a dedicated video card because crypto and chip crisis. The whole PS5 with an extra controller cost less than an equivalent PC video card at the time :)
[I do have a video card now, but only because someone paid me to write neural network code.]
Nothing prevents you from running games under emulation on MacOS.
Apple and Wine provide the tools, and apps like Whisky make them easy to use.
> Essentially, this app combines multiple translation layers into a single translation tool. It uses Wine, a translation layer that allows Windows apps and games to run on POSIX-based operating systems, like macOS and Linux. It also uses Rosetta and the Game Porting Toolkit, which are two official Apple tools that allow x86 programs to run on Apple Silicon and serve as a framework for porting Windows games to macOS, respectively.
Normally, this sort of process would require users to manually port games to Mac. But by combining Wine, Rosetta, and the Game Porting Toolkit, this can all happen automatically.
You’d need to compare with what can be done on macOS including with things like crossover and the GPT. AFAICT, the Linux side is making progress, but still more games can be run from macOS.
> AFAICT, the Linux side is making progress, but still more games can be run from macOS.
I don't believe that's true. According to ProtonDB, 80% of the top-1000 most-played games on Steam are confirmed working on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
I haven't seen any source documenting nearly similar success rates with Mac but I also haven't seriously tried gaming on Apple Silicon.
The Mac efforts rely on MoltenVK for and Vulkan needs which itself relies on the underlying Metal API. As I understand it Asahi/Honeykrisp driver for Vulkan does not rely on the Metal API so it actually can do more conformant Vulkan than Crossover/Whisky can. For example tranform feedback and other geometry shader stuff will work on Asahi. MoltenVK is working on it, but not there yet.
On many games I have tried DX => DXVK => MoltenVk => Metal is significantly faster than DX => D3DMetal. For example XCOM2 is about twice the frames per second (yeah it has an official Mac version but it is even slower).
I will have to check this newest development out, but as someone who dual boots Asahi and MacOS - up until now MacOS with Crossover has definitely been the best experience, if you are willing to pay
So, wait, does this mean that gaming is better on Linux, on a Mac?