is linux already better for gaming on macs than macos?
No Vulkan and just WineD3D on OpenGL makes it hard to consider good. Might be pretty good after they find a way to run Vulkan on it, which might be tricky given how the hardware was explicitly designed to run just the proprietary Metal API.
A vulkan driver already exists and has made progress, it just needs some more time.
I’ve heard something about Apple Silicon GPUs being tile-based and not immediate mode, which means the Vulkan API is different compared to regular PCs. How has this been addressed in the Vulkan driver?
The blog has multiple progress posts https://asahilinux.org/blog/
I’ll admit im not an expert but shes not brought up tiling at all as a problem.
Yeah, in a Reddit comment, Hector Martin himself said that the memory bandwidth on the Apple SIlicon GPU is so big that any potential performance problems due to TBDR vs IMR are basically insignificant.
…which is a funny fact because I had another Reddit user swear up and down that TBDR was a big problem and that’s why Apple decided not to support Vulkan and instead is forcing everyone to go Metal.
As an actual M1+Asahi user and a gamer: Asahi is not there yet. Right now, if you’re on macOS, Crossover (or Porting Kit) and/or Parallels is able to run more games and with better performance compared to Asahi (using krun + FEX). Also, Steam on macOS (non-native) is much more peformant compared to Asahi, where it’s currently slow and glitchy.
But that will all change in the future once the Vulkan driver and TSO patches are ready. FEX is also seeing a lot of improvements, so by the end of the year, there’s a good chance that gaming on Asahi would be much better than macOS.
