"Game Porting Toolkit" by Apple will allow Windows games to run on Mac, similar to Proton on Linux

HarveyHouston · Jun 8, 2023

Latiodile said:
before apple silicon (and after powerpc) you could use bootcamp to install windows/linux on a mac via either dualboot or single boot. i have a mac mini from 2007 that has just windows 7 on it

So, you can't actually run Windows games on Mac OS, but you could install Windows depending on the Mac you own. Interesting.

Latiodile · Jun 8, 2023

HarveyHouston said:
So, you can't actually run Windows games on Mac OS, but you could install Windows depending on the Mac you own. Interesting.

yeah basically, I bought this mac mini just so I could play games on it lol, it's the closest specs I could find to my first laptop, ironically for the most reasonably price I could find

edit: forgot to quote, oops

anhminh · Jun 8, 2023

Why buy a Macbook for gaming when a gaming laptop is cheaper?

Tom Bombadildo · Jun 8, 2023

HarveyHouston said:
Is it possible to run Windows or Linux games on a Mac anyway? Not a Mac user, so don't know.

So technically there are a couple ways you can do it. On Intel-based Macs, you can just install Windows using Bootcamp and play games that way.

For M1 based Macs, there are a couple of options. You can just use Wine, which works for some stuff but has worse compatibility on Mac vs using Wine on Linux. I was able to play through Pizza Tower without issues using Wine, and my wife plays an..."acquired" version of the Sims 4 with no problems as well, so depends on what you want to do.

Or you can use Parallels, which is basically just a Windows VM. But performance will vary widely, as Parallels only lets you make a VM of the ARM versions of Windows 10/11, so not only do you have the performance hit of a VM in the way but also the x86 emulation Windows for ARM uses to run x86 based things. That said, I was able to play Dragon Age: Origins all the way through on my M1 Macbook Air without issue, and there are a few compatibility lists that give you a good idea of what you can get away with.

EDIT: As for the news, I'll wait until someone actually uses it before I'll say much, but I'm not holding my breath for much. Apple's silicon is cool, but the iGPU in both the M1s and M2s can barely beat out Nvidias 1650 which is despicable for the prices they charge, so I wouldn't expect any mind blowing ports.

DaniPoo · Jun 8, 2023

RHOPKINS13 said:
Apple garbage. Why split the community even more? Wine already runs on Mac, seems to me that more effort should be put into making Proton run on Mac. Otherwise I highly doubt that this "Game Porting Toolkit" will ever see the amount of progress Proton has.

What's your problem? This is a step in the right direction right? Macs are getting better than ever for running games, and you're complaining that it not going to be as good as Proton before even giving it a chance. Stop being a lame hater.

Post automatically merged: Jun 8, 2023

anhminh said:
Why buy a Macbook for gaming when a gaming laptop is cheaper?

Answer, You don't buy MacBooks for gaming..
But it's nice that you can run some games on your MacBook.

Kubas_inko · Jun 8, 2023

Do you want games Apple? Give us Vulkan and there will be plenty of games.

slaphappygamer · Jun 8, 2023

Genius Bar is about to get more genuisy.

LokeYourLord · Jun 8, 2023

My girlfriend's latest Mac Book Pro is barely capable of running Stardew Valley without melting down into a liquid pile of trash. Anything beyond that would result in a nuclear detonation, so yeah no thanks Apple, your hardware never was and never will be focused on gaming, as long as you prioritize your stupid design philosophy over functionality and efficiency (cooling, especially). And I never have and never will buy any walled garden Apple product, and your new dystopian nerd-goggles aren't going to entice me either.

Those who really want to get into gaming, drop Apple. Buy a gaming Desktop, build one yourself, or get a gaming Laptop. The laptop, although weaker than a Desktop, will still be much more powerful than any Apple device and cost half the amount. Overpriced hunk of fuck, is what Apple devices are. Yeah no thanks.

Dragon91Nippon · Jun 8, 2023

Doesn't MacOS Have a version of Wine, what benefit is this over just installing Wine?

TomSwitch · Jun 8, 2023

What we really want is Vision Pro on Windows 11. Is that harder than asking China and US to be friend?

yoyoyo69 · Jun 8, 2023

So Vavle and the community do all the legwork and Apple now stroll on and act like they're the Big I am?

TomSwitch · Jun 8, 2023

LokeYourLord said:
My girlfriend's latest Mac Book Pro is barely capable of running Stardew Valley without melting down into a liquid pile of trash. Anything beyond that would result in a nuclear detonation, so yeah no thanks Apple, your hardware never was and never will be focused on gaming, as long as you prioritize your stupid design philosophy over functionality and efficiency (cooling, especially). And I never have and never will buy any walled garden Apple product, and your new dystopian nerd-goggles aren't going to entice me either.

Those who really want to get into gaming, drop Apple. Buy a gaming Desktop, build one yourself, or get a gaming Laptop. The laptop, although weaker than a Desktop, will still be much more powerful than any Apple device and cost half the amount. Overpriced hunk of fuck, is what Apple devices are. Yeah no thanks.

You are wrong about Apple. Apple had been eyeing gaming since day one. Their desire to play game is only second to Nokia's desire to play game.

lordelan · Jun 8, 2023

ShadowOne333 said:
However, in the last couple of years, this landscape for PCs has changed dramatically, as the introduction to the public of SteamOS and Proton by Valve now allows playing even the most recent AAA titles under Linux machines, thanks to the implementation of Proton.

Correct and I can't praise it enough for that. I was able to play Diablo IV without any bugs in full 60 fps and nice graphics with full controller support day one on my Steam Deck.
It just shows what a long way we came. It's what every Linux gamer dreamed of 10 or 20 years ago and I'm sure no one would have bet we would ever reach that state.
Diablo IV is a 100 % Windows game. The devs did absolutely nothing to make it easier to run on Linux and yet here I am enjoying it since last Friday.
Yes it involves 2 - 3 additional steps in the install process but now I have it among my other games in Steam with a nice icon and banner and it always auto-updates itself and just works.

langston · Jun 8, 2023

diggeloid said:
My understanding is that this is really just a straight port of Wine/Proton, but with a DirectX-to-Metal translation layer developed from scratch by Apple (like DxVK). Games would run in their existing Rosetta translation layer thing, so performance is going to be limited. Maybe the Mac Pro will be competitive (in performance, not price) with a dedicated Linux or Windows PC with a old-ish AMD or Nvidia GPU.

They're pitching this as a developer tool to evaluate the amount of work involved in porting your game to Metal. AFAIK Apple doesn't want developers to use this to do the actual port. They want devs to add a Metal backend to their engines and use first party APIs. Idk if they'll even accept appstore submissions built on this.

...which all seems very stupid to me. Why go through all of the effort to implement something like this? If they want to motivate devs to port their games to Mac, they should release (and support) official Vulkan and OpenGL drivers. The value proposition of Metal would be for optimizing and using unique features. I don't see why they're obsessed with getting people to use Metal, since it makes no difference to the end user, and it's not going to lock any devs into their ecosystem since most engines are built to accommodate multiple backends.

Opengl is old, outdated, and deprecated and shouldn't even be considered. They should just officially use moltenvk (vulkun to metal translation layer) and let devs use that for app store games.

Tom Bombadildo · Jun 8, 2023

Kubas_inko said:
Do you want games Apple? Give us Vulkan and there will be plenty of games.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK <

Granted, it's not "official" support and it's not running on bare metal, but neither is this so it's basically as close as you'll ever get. It's compliant with Vulkan 1.2, which has been good enough for Dolphin/RPCS3 to implement, and IIRC Valve ported Dota and Artifact over to MacOS with Vulkan support using this as well. It pretty much does exactly what this does, but Vulkan instead of DX12. And yet despite being available for something like 6ish years now, beyond a couple games/apps that came out with Vulkan support, there hasn't been any huge increase of ports.

It's not so much an API problem as it is a "brand" problem. Mac hasn't been known as a gaming powerhouse for years now, pretty much since they swapped from PPC to Intel in the early 2000s, and the hardware specs the most popular Macbooks and iMacs have had were never good enough for most games anyways so there was never any point to point in all that work from a sales perspective. Apples attempting to fix that themselves now, so we'll see if it works, but I don't think they'll make any good headway.

Sl4sh · Jun 8, 2023

TheStonedModder said:
Cool idea. Shitty execution locking it behind a dev account.

It’s just a needless paywall

This is a tool for game studios to test their games and get a grip on the performance they could have if they port their game to macOS. This is not meant for consumers to just use it to play games.
Also it is open-source and it doesn't require you to pay anything to use it. Developers account are free.

Post automatically merged: Jun 8, 2023

codezer0 said:
One of the big threads on Steam forums was how once couldn't even launch, install or run steam at all on Mac OS Catalina, which was the first build of the OS to be able to recognize and work on those systems. It went on for a while with a lot of "me too" comments, far more than I expected to see.

Apple, being Apple, abjectly refused to even acknowledge a problem with the behavior.

Bro this was years ago when they deprecated x86 apps in macOS. Steam runs fine now...there are barely if any games that run on Apple Silicon though since most games ARE x86 apps and developers don't care enough about macOS to update their games.

The Catboy · Jun 8, 2023

LokeYourLord said:
My girlfriend's latest Mac Book Pro is barely capable of running Stardew Valley without melting down into a liquid pile of trash. Anything beyond that would result in a nuclear detonation, so yeah no thanks Apple, your hardware never was and never will be focused on gaming, as long as you prioritize your stupid design philosophy over functionality and efficiency (cooling, especially). And I never have and never will buy any walled garden Apple product, and your new dystopian nerd-goggles aren't going to entice me either.

Those who really want to get into gaming, drop Apple. Buy a gaming Desktop, build one yourself, or get a gaming Laptop. The laptop, although weaker than a Desktop, will still be much more powerful than any Apple device and cost half the amount. Overpriced hunk of fuck, is what Apple devices are. Yeah no thanks.

That sounds like she needs to get her MacBook checked out. It shouldn’t be heating up like that over Stardew. Either that or she doesn’t have the latest and still using an Intel-based one, which are known for heating issues. My M2 Air barely heats up when I am playing Vault Hunters and that’s a rather intense mod pack for Minecraft.

Sl4sh · Jun 8, 2023

LokeYourLord said:
My girlfriend's latest Mac Book Pro is barely capable of running Stardew Valley without melting down into a liquid pile of trash. Anything beyond that would result in a nuclear detonation, so yeah no thanks Apple, your hardware never was and never will be focused on gaming, as long as you prioritize your stupid design philosophy over functionality and efficiency (cooling, especially). And I never have and never will buy any walled garden Apple product, and your new dystopian nerd-goggles aren't going to entice me either.

Those who really want to get into gaming, drop Apple. Buy a gaming Desktop, build one yourself, or get a gaming Laptop. The laptop, although weaker than a Desktop, will still be much more powerful than any Apple device and cost half the amount. Overpriced hunk of fuck, is what Apple devices are. Yeah no thanks.

Yeah you're bs*ing here a lot. M1 was a total game changer...to the point where it doesn't even NEEDS fans for the base M1 and M2. Battery life and performance per watt is the best there is in the entire industry, better than intel's and better than AMD's for all of the M series chips. No current Macbook will "melt down into a liquid pile of trash", much less running something as simple as StarDew Valley when you can play games as demanding Shadow of the Tomb Raider (you can look it up in the AppStore, I can't post links in the forum).
Also Apple (by revenue) is one of the biggest gaming companies in the world (again you can look up The WallStreet Journal article about it, I can't post links in the forum) . It is only logical that now that they want to become a serious place for gamers to be and they have the resources to make it happen.
On your last point you are right tough, if you're really into gaming buy a gaming PC. It will take years for macOS to become a serious gaming platform and even so it will always be second to Windows.

Alato · Jun 8, 2023

Years ago I probably would've hopped on the "why would u game on a Mac" train, but now since using an M1 Max Macbook pro for the last year, I'd love to have better game compatibility on this machine. It's the best laptop I've ever owned, and it turns out that most misgivings people have about Macs aren't actual issues.

I didn't get this laptop for gaming, but this thing is powerful – the only real bottleneck I've experienced with playing some modern games and high settings has been the emulation/translation layers you have to use to play the games. Native games run beautifully. And the M1 chip runs silent. And the battery lasts for hours on end. And not to mention, Macbook displays are top notch.

If most games could run as well as a native game, then I'd have very little reason to touch my desktop PC. So, I'm hopeful that this removes a large barrier for devs to actually publish native Mac releases – we'll see if it makes any significant differences at the end of the day.

nl255 · Jun 8, 2023

Alato said:
Years ago I probably would've hopped on the "why would u game on a Mac" train, but now since using an M1 Max Macbook pro for the last year, I'd love to have better game compatibility on this machine. It's the best laptop I've ever owned, and it turns out that most misgivings people have about Macs aren't actual issues.

I didn't get this laptop for gaming, but this thing is powerful – the only real bottleneck I've experienced with playing some modern games and high settings has been the emulation/translation layers you have to use to play the games. Native games run beautifully. And the M1 chip runs silent. And the battery lasts for hours on end. And not to mention, Macbook displays are top notch.

If most games could run as well as a native game, then I'd have very little reason to touch my desktop PC. So, I'm hopeful that this removes a large barrier for devs to actually publish native Mac releases – we'll see if it makes any significant differences at the end of the day.

It won't. What would really help is if Hangover can be made to work on the new macs and with apple's x86/x64 emulator since the whole point of Hangover is to run wine/proton itself and all windows API calls as native ARM code and only do CPU emulation for actual x86/x64 instructions in the game/app binary rather than running the entire thing under emulation. Of course that is assuming that native ARM software is allowed to call/use the rosetta emulator manually themselves otherwise it will be necessary to use qemu instead like it does on Linux/ARM.

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