Christina WarrenApple added #DX12 support to macOS and Apple Silicon via its Game Porting Toolkit. It’s basically a 20k patch to Wine that will make it easy to play AAA Windows games on macOS without using a VM. https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple
This video goes into more details if you don’t want to read the insane patch file augmented on top of the homebrew formula. https://youtu.be/g3n62FOX1Go
Apple hid something AMAZING for Mac gaming at WWDC
Ade Thompson@film_girl If the aim of the toolkit is to bring more native games to Mac then it won’t see the light of day to the general public as a way to run Windows games as is which is a shame.
@apt they have to. It’s based on GPL code, they can’t hide the code. They have to make it public. I bet you could run this now against a bunch of AAA games on Steam and get them running on Apple Silicon with no problem.
@film_girl Doesn’t feel very ‘Apple’ but good news, cue a third party dev to make something of this in the coming weeks. *cough* @stroughtonsmith *cough*
@apt @stroughtonsmith oh, launchers will exist very soon for sure. Probably some that even feel very Apple. This is essentially Proton for Mac. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software) and I expect to see similar frontends the same way Steam Deck has multiple frontends beyond just the Steam interface.
benwu@film_girl this is exactly what I've been hoping for since I learned how the steam deck worked.
Antwan van Houdt@benwu @film_girl used to run Half Life 2 like this back when I was little with only an iMac family computer. Wineskin was also great!
Jose Munoz@film_girl @apt Feels like to make it actually usable there will have to be some optimization or conversion to Metal.
The vid has Medium on an M2 Max running at 1080 with 28 fps. That's not quite good enough to just wrap up and ship, I would think?
@ringslinger @apt I think it depends on the game. Some tweaks might be needed but I think it’ll depend on the game.
Colin Cornaby@film_girl @ringslinger @apt In the sessions they talk about this a bit more. Key point is these games still aren't native. Windows means x86 which means Rosetta. This translation is basically not meant to be performant - and they show examples of games having performance issues which need to be corrected in a native port.
@film_girl @ringslinger @apt I’d wager for many games (especially a few years old) it’ll be pretty good.
@ringslinger @film_girl I think that’s the point of the video, run your current windows game without optimisation and tweak accordingly so that’s maybe a worse case scenario demo 🤷♂️
@apt @film_girl That's certainly what they are promoting.
@apt @film_girl Wine is not GPL, it's LGPL. They don't have to publish all the code, and indeed they don't for the D3DMetal component.