Comment on Valve 'Fremont' APU breaks cover on Geekbench, most likely for a future console
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 1 day agoIn the case of Macs it’s not an issue with the ARM architecture, but with Apple. Since they dropped support for some libraries a few years ago, new versions of wine (and proton) stopped working on Apple Silicon. That’s the main and pretty much only reason why you can only play like 13 games on newer Macs.
As for Linux, ARM support is still in its early stages. From my experience it’s not even ready for regular daily use. Might depend on the device though. M1 Macbooks run pretty good with Asahi.
Thanks for the info. I assume when you say that they dropped support for some libraries, you mean those libraries are no longer being maintained for the new Mac arm processors?
I’m not super familiar with how portable different libraries are against similar architectures, but assume the major issue is Mac arm chips differ enough from the mass market that progress on Linux arm won’t directly correlate to any progress with macs?
After introducing Metal (their own proprietary graphics api), Apple killed OpenGL support and never implemented Vulkan support. Almost every single video game nowadays uses either DirectX (Microsoft’s proprietary API) or Vulkan for 3D graphics. 2D games use OpenGL and Vulkan. OpenGL and Vulkan are both open source and cross platform.
Windows supports everything, Linux everything except DirectX, and MacOS (for Apple Silicon devices) only supports Metal. You can still play OpenGL games on Intel-based Macs. Steam tells you which games won’t work on recent Mac systems.
In order for a game to run on ARM Macs, it has to either be ported to Metal, or there needs to be a compatibility layer like Wine and Proton. However, neither of these two work, since Apple no longer supports OpenGL or Vulkan. Theoretically, it is possible for people to write a new compatibility layer, specifically for Metal. The problem is, nobody wants to, because it’s a lot of work (as usual with development for Apple devices), and you never know when Apple drops support for some other libraries/APIs/drivers.
Additionally, Apple seems to be working on their own Metal translation layer. Leaks show impressive performance in Cyberpunk 2077. However, nobody knows what the availability will be like or when it releases.
You have literally no idea what you’re talking about:
Game Porting Toolkit is Apple’s new translation layer released on 6th June, 2023. Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK) combines Wine with Apple’s own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 11 and 12. This is a less user-friendly method of installing Windows games on Apple Silicon Macs compared to CrossOver or Parallels, however it unlocks the ability to play many DirectX 12 games. A lot more games work using GPTK, however, games that use anti-cheat or aggressive DRMs generally don’t work.
Not only has Apple well and truly released that, but Codeweavers also develops a compatibility program based off WINE called Crossover.
You’re also massively wrong about DirectX on Linux, DXVK and VKD3D both work to run various versions of it on Linux.
I very clearly wrote that Linux does not support DirectX. Which is 100% true, no matter how you look at it. Just because there are translation layers, it doesn’t mean Linux ‘supports DirectX’, because it doesn’t. It supports Vulkan, which DXVK and VKD3D translate DirectX API calls to.
Let’s say you can’t read Spanish, but you hire a translator to translate a text for you. Now you can read it. Does that mean you can suddenly read Spanish?
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
They created the Game Porting Toolkit a while ago that basically mimics WINE but via Rosetta 2 (their x86>ARM translation layer). I just don’t think a lot of devs have taken them up on it and for some ridiculous Apple reasons they don’t let consumers just try games.
Also absolutely no idea what you’re talking about with Linux on ARM. The RaspberryPi has existed for ~15 years at this point, the platform is far more mature than Windows on ARM and rivals macOS for support. ARM isn’t a monolith though, like amd64 is. So, thanks to a lack of working with Linux devs, the Snapdragon Elite X isn’t particularly well supported yet. This is also why Asahi isn’t actually a super fair comparison, because Apple doesn’t release anything so it’s had to fully reverse engineer everything that a CPU/GPU does.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Hmm… Must have missed that. I’ll need to take a look. Might be the exact same thing I mentioned and I just had no idea it was already released.
I wrote “From my experience” and “Might depend on the device though.” Also, RaspberryPi is not a daily use device. At least not for the vast majority of people.
If Linux works on ARM for other people - great. I’m hoping to be able to switch to it sometime in the near future. However, the last time I tried it was horrendous. A lot of programs I use were completely unavailable, with no compatibility layer that I know of. That was about 2 years ago.
That said, I also tried Windows 11 on ARM around the same time and it was great. Practically everything worked out of the box and worked flawlessly. It was basically the same experience as on amd64.