Comment by pdpi

7 hours ago

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.

  • 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.

    • Valve seems to break free form depending on someone else’s walled garden.

      Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden.

      Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software.

  • True, forgot about that. That said, Apple does have D3DMetal. A man can dream that they eventually opensource that.

  • 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.

I believe that was part of the original plan for Proton, but with the success of the Steam Deck that got shelved and it moved to a focus purely on Linux.

I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment.

CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory.

I did catch that the streaming stick for the Valve Frame in the announcement video was plugged into a computer that looked an awful lot like a Mac.

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.