A few years ago, the idea of running PC games on a Mac, Linux, or Arm processors would have been ridiculous. But the developers behind Asahi Linux, the independent project that is making Linux work on Apple Silicon Macs, managed to do all three at once.
The feat brings together a perfect storm of open source projects, according to Asahi Linux GPU lead Alyssa Rosenzweig: the FEX project to translate x86 CPU code to Arm, the Wine project to run Windows binaries on Linux, DXVK, and the Proton project to translate DirectX 12 API calls to Vulkan API calls and of course the Asahi project's Vulkan compatible driver for Apple graphics hardware.
Technically, games run inside a virtual machine due to differences in how Apple Silicon and x86 systems approach memory: Apple systems use 16 KB memory pages, while x86 systems use 4 KB pages, something that causes problems for Asahi and some other Arm Linux distributions on a regular basis and a gap that the VM bridges.
You'd never guess this was the Windows version of consequences 4 running on a Mac running Linux. Credit: Alyssa Rosenzweig
Rosenzweig's post shows screenshots of Control, consequences 4, The Witcher 3, ghost runner, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal 2and hollow knightalthough, as she points out, most of these games still don't run at 60 frames per second.