Comment by GeekyBear
3 months ago
> 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.
3 months ago
> 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.
Apple could but they're not interested in non-native games, they want native ports or nothing. As I discussed a few posts over, Apple went to the trouble of developing a DirectX compatibility layer, but then told game developers they're not allowed to use it for anything besides evaluating whether their game would run well enough on Mac hardware. If they go ahead with a port then Apple still expects them to do it all the hard way.
It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
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Apple could but Apple would rather die they allow something to work cross platform.
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Apple thinks PC games are for gross nerds and would rather not sully their fashion image by associating with gamer any more than is absolutely necessary. So no, Apple won't be doing that.
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It would make sense, but Apple has large amounts of disdain for people having fun with their products. This evidenced by the large amounts of engineering they've put into very large, capable, and efficient GPUs, only to squander them on rendering web pages and liquid glass.
They released Apple Vision Pro with no ability to play popular PC games on it.
A VR headset. That doesn't play games.
Nope because they could not gouge developes with pricy tools, steep registration fees and cutthroat slice of their sales on Apple's app market.
Apple already has their own way, and they rather have studios rewrite the games.
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
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Apple and gaming is like oil and water, it'll never happen.
They'll spend billions on a handful of (late) AAA ports for macOS every 4-5 years, and then go radio silent again.
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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.
That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.
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> Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.
Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation.
Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.
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.