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Comment by unknownaccount | Hacker News Reader

At 28 FPS…

Yes, and at a really low resolution. That's okay, it's expected.

Make It Work, Make It Right, Make It Fast. I personally didn't expect Asahi would get this far on steps #1 and #2 nearly as quickly as they have. It's bloody impressive.

It’s at a 2004 resolution at sub 2004 FPS and the title is clickbait claiming it “runs”, sorry but 28 FPS isn’t considered playable in my book. I’m just not as impressed by that as people pretend I should be. They should have waited and at least gotten a solid 60 before this should’ve been shown off. The sad state of the Apple (and Microsoft too) reverse engineering scene has been obliterated by lawsuits and this whole Asahi Linux thing is a fluke that someone hadn’t got shut down yet. It actually saddens me what shambles the Apple RE’ing scene is for it to be taking this long to achieve only this meager level of support. Seemingly only 2 or 3 people in the world are working on this? For the most powerful laptops in the world?

The title never claims that it's playable, just that it runs.

That said, I've played many games at <30 fps and low resolution in the past, due to not being able to buy the latest & greatest hardware - it's perfectly playable, even if not an ideal experience.

Of course, it's different here - the hardware is more than capable. But do you expect them to jump from nothing to smooth 60 fps full resolution with nothing in between? Maybe a post like this will motivate more people to join development, as opposed to waiting until it's perfect.

> 28 FPS isn’t considered playable

My dude, the first 50 years of gaming struggled to reach 24 fps, 24fps is the framerate of the film industry we've only recently had access to 4k60fps in the last few years.

It's a start - remember this developer has basically bootstrapped linux on Apple's custom hardware and this is the early stages of the latest area she's focussed on (getting the GPU working). This has been an impressive project, it'll no doubt continue.

Minor correction but most of the "bootstrapping" work unrelated to the GPU has been done by Hector Martin, Alyssa's focus has always been on the GPU side of it.

Ah apologies, it's Alyssa who I usually see in relation to Asahi Linux so maybe I over-attributed it to her :)

Which is pretty incredible in a day 1 driver. It's already playable. What a great year this team has had. Thanks Alyssa, Yuka, and Lina.

>day 1 driver

Mesa is 27 years old.

I believe they're calling it Day 1 in the sense that the devs themselves are saying a lot of it is hacked together and not daily driver material for most of the users. A lot of releases and revisions before this is even upstreamed.

When talking about impressive performance of a "day 1" build I feel there is a difference between new drivers and new ports of existing drivers.

This isn't a port of an existing driver. It's completely new Kernel space + user space driver. Of course it makes use of the mesa "framework" but that doesn't mean the driver is 27 years old.

What do you think porting a driver to a completely new GPU means? Doing so will require new kernel space and user space code. The existence of these new components doesn't mean there is a completely new graphics driver. Only parts of it that are platform specific are new.

The graphics driver of a system spans from a talking to the hardware to exposing a graphics API such as OpenGL or Vulkan for applications to use. Splitting up the graphics driver into separate components and calling each component a driver is different from what I mean when I am referring to a driver.

Mesa isn't a driver. Mesa is just an abstraction on top of the software that DRIVES the hardware (a driver), which is being written from scratch. Nobody (including the Asahi developers) but you subscribes to your definition of a driver. Drivers implementing Mesa may share next to nothing in common, so no, it's not a "port".

The ashahi driver inside Mesa builds upon Gallium3D so it does use shared components of the Mesa library stack. This is not a from scratch driver, it's one that uses the powers of the Mesa library.

Correct. But this is a new driver.

Part of the driver is new, but part of it is just existing code that is part of Mesa.

So... It's a new driver. You don't say a program written days ago in C89 is 33 years old because the programs uses the c89 standard library.

I don't think Mesa is referred to as a driver here and I'm not sure why it should be.

Just wait until they install optifine

Better than no GPU driver and needing to spin the CPU for that work.

wonder why much the macos version gets ootb?

On a macbook with a M1 pro I generated a single new world that started in a forest biome and with the default settings I got about 80 fps when using a resolution of 854x480.

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