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AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

(rosenzweig.io)
944 points 6a74 | 4 comments | 10 Oct 24 14:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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spease ◴[10 Oct 24 16:29 UTC] No.41800525[source]▶
This is super cool.

So, wait, does this mean that gaming is better on Linux, on a Mac?

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1. GeekyBear ◴[10 Oct 24 20:24 UTC] No.41803172[source]▶
Emulation has unavoidable overhead.

For instance, Alyssa mentions in this post that most emulated games will need at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum.

In addition, native ARM games on MacOS don't have the additional overhead of emulating a different CPU architecture and Graphics API.

However, that doesn't take away from this emulated support being an amazing achievement.

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2. jillesvangurp ◴[11 Oct 24 10:35 UTC] No.41808202[source]▶
> 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.

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3. nottorp ◴[11 Oct 24 15:59 UTC] No.41810656[source]▶
> at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum.

And the minimum is pretty minimum. A 16 Gb arm mac will go into yellow memory pressure while running emulated games, I've noticed.

4. GeekyBear ◴[11 Oct 24 18:56 UTC] No.41812324[source]▶
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.