Comment by jsheard
3 months ago
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.
Valve could implement a separate Metal backend for Proton, what I'm saying is they probably wouldn't want to spend their resources on that.
Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
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That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.
I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.
The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
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They could also use MoltenVK
As far as I understand, there's actually an intermediate driver on macOS that implements Vulkan on top of Metal, similar to how Proton implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan.
The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.
https://www.lunarg.com/lunarg-at-xdc-2025-kosmickrisp-overvi...
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.
Hard to swallow.
Every day I sit down at a Mac for work and proceed to launch VS Code, Zed, Outlook, DBeaver, Excel, Teams, LogSeq, Syncthing, Chrome, Firefox, LM Studio and Docker. I prefer MacOS but basically all of my application workflow exists for Windows verbatim and if using browser versions of the MS apps, on Linux too.
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Apple is big enough to not need gaming and their philosophy is to have the most control possible on their ecosystem and to be the most closed possible. For them it makes no sense to encourage steam to be big on mac (except as a way to jumpstart their own system before closing it). And it is especially true now that steam is making machines, so is a direct competitor
DXMT has been advancing very quickly: https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt
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.