Play Windows games on Apple Silicon Macs

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Impulse is a lightweight virtual machine for Apple Silicon Macs, built with gaming in mind. It runs KDE Plasma in a window and uses your Mac’s GPU for Vulkan and OpenGL instead of falling back to software rendering.

Use it to run Windows games through Proton, Linux games, development tools, or just a regular Linux desktop. x86 Linux applications can also run through FEX.

What you need

• A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)
• macOS 26 or later

Getting started

Watch the setup walkthrough

Click the thumbnail or the button above to open the video on YouTube.

1. Download the latest build from Releases, or build the app yourself (see Building).

2. Grab a config file from examples/gaming.impulse, or paste this into Terminal to create one:

cat > "$HOME/gaming.impulse" <<'EOF'
format_version = 1

memory_mib = 16384
vcpus = 8

disk = "gaming.raw"
disk_size_gib = 32 // You cannot shrink it
EOF

The file lands in your home folder (gaming.impulse in the main user directory on your Mac). Move it and keep it wherever you want your VM files. The virtual disk image is created next to the config file in that same folder. Choose disk_size_gib with care — you can grow the disk later by stopping the VM, increasing the value, and launching again, but you cannot shrink it once the disk image exists.

3. Open Impulse and pick your .impulse file.

If macOS blocks the app on first launch (it isn’t signed or notarized), go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.

4. Wait for Linux to boot, set up a user, and log in.

Every launch takes a moment to get going — that’s normal. The first launch takes significantly longer while Impulse finishes setting up the guest in the background; let it complete before judging boot time.

5. Open Applications → Games → Steam, sign in, install something, and play — or use the desktop for whatever you need.

What Impulse gives you

Graphics	Hardware-accelerated Vulkan and OpenGL
Games	Windows titles via Proton, Linux-native builds, x86 games via FEX
Desktop	KDE Plasma on Wayland — familiar, modern, works with Steam
Day-to-day	Sound, networking, shared clipboard, Retina and high-refresh displays

DirectX 9–11 games tend to work best today. Newer APIs are still catching up.

Building

You’ll need macOS 26+, Xcode, Rust, and Docker.

brew install cmake meson ninja pkg-config python
make app

Output: dist/Impulse.app. Guest image artifacts land in build/guest/.

To launch straight from the build tree:

make run

That uses examples/gaming.impulse by default.

Thanks

Impulse’s graphics stack builds on forks maintained by the UTM project. Big credit to everyone who made that possible.