Comment by jsheard
5 hours ago
Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...
5 hours ago
Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...
I believe this work is a continuation of the work the asahi linux people did to get games working on M-series macs. It seems Alyssa Rosenzweig works at valve as a contractor. Super cool work. Some seriously talented folks.
Alyssa works for Intel now, so I doubt she'll be doing much contract work for Valve anymore...
What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.
5 replies →
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493
This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:
> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.
> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.
It's mentioned in this issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8136 which was closed Oct 2024 with this comment by kisak-valve:
> Hello @Theleafir1, similar to #1493, this is not a realistic objective for Proton any time in the near future.
Finally some clarification on what valve time actually is.
What do you mean? Could you share your insight?
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Valve deciding to support Arm-based gaming is HUGE news
There was also a parallel effort to this end, targeting Android rather than plain Linux, resulting in an app called https://winlator.org/ — which also works quite well at this point. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0yUqcyY18)
That was a very higher quality YT video. It's clearly written by someone who knows when they're talking about even though it's mostly non-technical
Have to wonder if there is a world where Proton comes to macOS.
Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.
> Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan.
You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.
On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.
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Wouldn't it be Apple's benefit to get more gaming on MacOS? Their goals might align with Steam.
Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it.
1 reply →
I mean, theoretically they could backport the D3DMetal wine driver from the Game Porting Toolkit. Also I remember there was some early preliminary work done on stock wine a few years ago.
Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times.
True, forgot about that. That said, Apple does have D3DMetal. A man can dream that they eventually opensource that.
Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux.
The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.
Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.