Revolutionary Fedora Ashahi Remix Brings Windows Gaming to M1 Macs
October 15, 2024Users can easily install FAR, update drivers, and install Steam to begin gaming on their Macs.
Developers Alyssa Rosenzweig and her team have successfully enabled the running of popular Windows games such as Control, Fallout 4, Cyberpunk 2077, and Witcher 3 on M1 Macs using FAR.
There is potential for FAR's technology to be adapted for laptops using Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors, which currently struggle with running native x86 applications.
Historically, gaming on Apple Macs has been limited due to a smaller selection of compatible games compared to traditional PCs.
A significant technical challenge was aligning memory allocation pages, which was addressed by running a virtual Linux kernel with 4K pages alongside the main OS using 16K pages.
Fedora Ashahi Remix (FAR) is a groundbreaking Linux operating system designed to enable gaming on Apple Macs equipped with M1 chips.
FAR aims to expand x86 emulation capabilities beyond gaming, suggesting a future where gaming PCs could ship with Linux distributions that seamlessly run Windows games and applications.
FAR utilizes FEX-Emu to run x86 binaries on Arm architecture and employs Wine for translating commands from Windows to Linux.
To ensure compatibility, FAR uses DXVK and vkd3d-proton to convert DirectX instructions for Vulkan compatibility.
While the Steam Deck has shown that Windows games can run on Linux, FAR's achievement on Arm-based hardware is particularly noteworthy.
Currently, the latest AAA games do not run at 60 fps on FAR, as the project's primary focus is on compatibility rather than performance.
The virtual machine within FAR allows emulated applications to utilize up to 80% of the system's memory, with a recommendation of 16 GB of RAM for optimal performance.
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