Enlarge / Slowly but surely, the Asahi Linux team is getting Linux up and running on Apple Silicon Macs. (credit: Apple/Asahi Linux)

For around three years now, the team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has worked to support Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, despite Apple's total lack of involvement. Over the years, the project has gone from a "highly unstable experiment" to a "surprisingly functional and usable desktop operating system." Even Linus Torvalds has used it to run Linux on Apple's hardware.

The team has been steadily improving its open source, standards-conformant GPU driver for the M1 and M2 since releasing them in December 2022 , and today, the team crossed an important symbolic milestone: The Asahi driver's support for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics have officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team's latest graphics driver fully conforms with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2, the most recent version of either API. Apple's support in macOS tops out at OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010.

Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post that announced the new driver, which had to pass "over 100,000 tests" to be deemed officially conformant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple's GPUs don't support some features that would have made implementing these APIs more straightforward.

Enlarge / Real Racing running on a Vulkan-powered Raspberry Pi 4. (credit: Raspberry Pi )

The Raspberry Pi 4 has hit a major graphics milestone, adding support for a more modern Vulkan 3D API. While that doesn’t mean a smooth Doom (2016) experience on the single-board wonder, it does help Pis running Android and points to some future powers.

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced the Pi 4’s Vulkan 1.2 conformance on Monday. Support isn’t available yet in downloadable Pi-friendly operating systems but should be coming soon.

For most people using their Pi as a server, a DIY controller, or a light desktop, Vulkan 1.2 conformance won’t be noticeable. Desktop graphics on the standard Raspberry Pi OS are powered by OpenGL, the older graphics API that Vulkan is meant to replace. There is one group that benefits, says Upton : games and other 3D Android applications. Android uses Vulkan as its low-overhead graphics API.

DXVK, the Vulkan-based implementation of D3D9, D3D10 and D3D11 for Wine / Proton has version 1.9.3 out now . This is what's used in Steam Play Proton , to help get Windows games running nicely on Linux. It's a bit of an uphill battle to get so many tens of thousands of games to work nicely, but DXVK shows just how powerful and flexible Vulkan is as an API.

This release brings support for NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) for supported games, when used along with dxvk-nvapi . There's also a bunch of optimizations and accuracy improvements for D3D9 that should help fix games like Red Orchestra 2, Dark Souls 2 (original version), Dog Fight 1942, Bayonetta, Rayman Origins, Guilty Gear Xrd and Richard Burns Rally.

Pictured - Deep Rock Galactic on Linux with DXVK (Proton)

Other improvements include a fix for a "DXGI issue which would sometimes cause games to fail to enter fullscreen mode on some displays that do not support low rates across all resolutions" and improvements for Black Mesa, Crysis 3 Remastered, Euro Truck Simulator, Injustice Gods Among Us, Rocksmith 2014, Spliter Cell: Chaos Theory, Sim City 2013 and The Guild 3.

As a reminder: you can upgrade the version of DXVK used in Proton, without waiting on a new release. To do so you can just overwrite the existing DXVK files with the release download of DXVK 1.9.3. You can find your Proton install somewhere like this (depending on your Steam Library drives):

path-to-your/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton x.x/dist

Where x.x is whatever Proton version installed you wish to give a new DXVK.

Inside there you will see "lib" and "lib64", for 32bit and 64bit. Inside each of those, there's a "wine" folder and inside there is a "dxvk" folder and that's where you replace the files with new versions. Do so at your own risk but it's usually harmless. If you mess anything up, one way to ensure it gets reinstalled cleanly is just to remove the "/dist" folder.