I wonder if this will dramatically improve gaming on a Mac? Valve has been making games more reliable due to Steam Deck, and gaming on Linux is getting better every year.
Could games be run inside a virtual Linux environment, rather than Apple’s Metal or similar tool?
This would also help game developers - now they only need to build for Windows, Linux, and consoles.
Apple's Virtualization Framework doesn't support 3D acceleration for non-macOS guests.
Isn't the Linux gaming stuff really an emulator for Windows games? So it'd be like, windows emulation inside Linux virtualization inside macos?
As far as I understand, it's a modified/extended version of Wine, which, as the name suggests, is not an emulator (but rather a userspace reimplementation of the Windows API, including a layer that translates DirectX to OpenGL/Vulkan).
The reverse, i.e. running Linux binaries on Windows or macOS, is not easily possible without virtualization, since Linux uses direct syscalls instead of always going through a dynamically linked static library that can take care of compatibility in the way that Wine does. (At the very least, it requires kernel support, like WSL1; Wine is all userspace.)
No, and with sunset of Rosetta, they'll kill off many of the few games that fun on macOS.
According to reporting Rosetta will still be supported for old games that rely on Intel code
> But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers. Devs who want their apps to continue running on macOS after that will need to transition to either Apple Silicon-native apps or universal apps that run on either architecture.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/apple-details-the-en...
Windows games already run on macOS via WINE. Using a VM would just add overhead not reduce it.
I imagine running in a VM would hurt performance a lot.
Not necessarily. For example, the Xbox 360 runs every game in a hypervisor, so technically, everything is running in a VM.
It's all a question of using the right/performant hardware interfaces, e.g. IOMMU-based direct hardware access rather than going through software emulation for performance-critical devices.