Apple's New Proton-like Tool Can Run Windows Games on a Mac (theverge.com) 50
If you're hoping to see more Windows games on Mac then those dreams might finally come true soon. From a report: Apple has dropped some big news for game developers at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week, making it far easier and quicker to port Windows games to Mac thanks to a Proton-like environment that can translate and run the latest DirectX 12 Windows games on macOS. Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that's similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck.
It's powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple's tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game. Mac gaming has been a long running meme among the PC gaming community, despite Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky ports being some rare recent exceptions to macOS gaming being largely ignored.
"The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac," explains Aiswariya Sreenivassan, an engineering project manager for GPUs and graphics at Apple, in a WWDC session earlier this week.
It's powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple's tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game. Mac gaming has been a long running meme among the PC gaming community, despite Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky ports being some rare recent exceptions to macOS gaming being largely ignored.
"The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac," explains Aiswariya Sreenivassan, an engineering project manager for GPUs and graphics at Apple, in a WWDC session earlier this week.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I agree but gamers are nowadays more familiar with proton because of Steam then Wine.
And proton has the advantage of joining the party after a lot of the initial issues were dwelt with so it doesn't get the knee-jerk reaction that Wine unfairly gets.
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what about the anti cheat tripping on that? (Score:2)
what about the anti cheat tripping on that?
Re:what about the anti cheat tripping on that? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's only a problem if you play games that include anti-cheat. There are a lot of people who exclusively play single player games.
I think there are a few anti-cheat systems that do work with Proton, but in that case the developer/publisher explicitly decided to support it.
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There's only one anti-cheat measure that can work reliably, playing with friends. Don't support anti-cheat games or Digital Restriction Management (DRM). You're only encouraging them to think that crap actually works.
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It works with Elden Ring, assuming you installing it in Steam config folder. Install on something like a secondary drive, and it will not work.
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Re: So... Wine? (Score:2)
No one is ever perma banned for playing on an alternate hardware or api or even an emu. It is rare to even be temp banned
If anticheat is not functional the game won't let you play. No bans, just log in on Windows or whatever instead.
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Wine has been around for decades. When I used it as a teenager
Wine has been around for thousands of years. In many places it's illegal for a teenager to use it.
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Wine has been around for decades. When I used it as a teenager
Wine has been around for thousands of years. In many places it's illegal for a teenager to use it.
Teenagers have been whining far longer than that.
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Wine has been around for decades. When I used it as a teenager, getting an individual game to work was a project with no guarantee of success.
You make it sound like Wine hasn't progressed since you were a teenager. Wine has come a long way since a couple of decades ago. After all Proton comes from Wine. It makes sense that Proton runs Steam games better than Wine, because it's specifically supposed to.
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1. Libraries like the one in the Slashdot headline that convert DirectX calls on the fly to calls that the OS can understand.
2. Valve’s profit motive in that they sell a Linux-based video game console (The Steam Deck). The more games that work with Proton, the more games Valve can say their console supports.
These are separate efforts from mainstream Wine development.
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WOOOOOOOOSH
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Nevermind, I got confused by the threading
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Wine from now is not the same as Wine from 30 years ago. You being able to play those games is partly because Wine was developed to be better and partly due to Valve additional patches. I would venture to say the bulk of the advancement is due to the core Wine development.
Re:So... Wine? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes it is wine. The funny thing is that Apple is so allergic to the GPL that they refused to fork wine or submit any patches upstream. Instead they provide a script that when run downloads wine source code, sets up a build environment, patches wine with their special patch, builds it and runs it under Rosetta. That's all this is. Kind of neat stuff. By distributing it in this way they can license their own patch under different terms because they aren't technically distributing wine. And it must not be extending any existing wine source code either. And upstream wine cannot merge it either. Apple is great that way. Real team player who cares about the common good.
From the duplicate department of duplicates (Score:3)
See the two day old post [slashdot.org] more properly giving credit (and details) where due.
Re: From the duplicate department of duplicates (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s related but not the same piece of news, since this was about Apple including CrossOvers work within the Game Porting Toolkit that Apple themselves release.
Similes don't work like that (Score:1)
Comparisons where the compared-to other is unknown fall flat on their face.
There's how many references to "proton"? And no explanation whatsoever of what that might be.
There's stupid. There's stupider. And there's too-lame-to-name, who make a sport out of not learning a thing despite every opportunity.
Don't stop at games (Score:2)
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Seeing as:
It's powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS
I doubt that Apple is going to be making a better version of CrossOver than CodeWeavers does/is...
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Seeing as:
It's powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS
I doubt that Apple is going to be making a better version of CrossOver than CodeWeavers does/is...
However, by working more closely with them, beyond gaming, they could make it even better...
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Actually, Codeweavers puts a lot of work into getting other programs to function on Mac and Linux - like the Windows version of MS Office, for example.
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Actually, Codeweavers puts a lot of work into getting other programs to function on Mac and Linux - like the Windows version of MS Office, for example.
yea, I was thinking of Apple working with them closely to make it even better and a more viable VM replacement.
480p gaming coming soon to a mac near you! (Score:2, Interesting)
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This is what I was wondering. Writing a emulator that emulate windows code to run games is certainly do able. But at what performance cost? Great, you can run the code to play the game but at 10 fps is it really worth it?
It is already common knowledge that M1/M2 Macs are poor performance, with a few carefully coded exceptions, against modern x86 hardware. I just don't see this being a viable gaming platform.
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Good point, but not all games are graphically intensive.
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You have a good point too, but nobody buys Macs for games anyway.
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This seems like a marketing mistake for Apple. They've been making all kinds of claims about their hardware being fast, based on the small amount of software which is optimized for their hardware. Even if those claims were entirely true this is going to paint them in a bad light.
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The "expansion cards" are not made for Macs.
They are standard expansion cards that fit into every "motherboard" that has the appropriated slots.
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On what GPUs exactly are these games gonna run? None of the new Macs support GPUs. They all rely on the M1/M2 integrated graphics. Which is slightly more powerful than Intel ones, but is roughly half the performance of a 3050 or RX6600.
I know GeekBench 6's Vulkan and Metal benchmarks might not be perfectly comparable, but...
So what you're saying is true only for the base model. The higher-end M1 and M2 silicon is considerably faster.
Or like Jaguar-based Xbox and PlayStation consoles (Score:2)
They all rely on the M1/M2 integrated graphics.
Likewise, every Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series, and PlayStation 5 game relies on the AMD APU's integrated graphics. The processors of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, for example, are nearly identical to the Athlon 5150 (a laptop processor on the Jaguar microarchitecture) except with twice as many cores.
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Which is slightly more powerful than Intel ones, but is roughly half the performance of a 3050 or RX6600.
Well, a base M2 is.
An M2 Max is considerably more powerful than a 3050.
Why are we comparing the lowest end against the midrange?
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Which is slightly more powerful than Intel ones, but is roughly half the performance of a 3050 or RX6600.
The M1/M2 chips have dozens of GPU cores.
For a game you only need *one*
So no idea what you do with a 3050 or RX6600 in regards of gaming.
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All GPUs have "dozens" (or even hundreds/thousands) of cores.
That's the entire point of the GPGPU model. Your shader kernel is designed to be massively parallel, so that you can run it on as many cores as you have available.
He was comparing the aggregate performance of the M1 to an RTX3050/RX6600.
Which is a valid comparison, but a silly one, because the M1 is the lowest performing part, and the RTX3050/RX6600 are.... not the lowest performing discrete GPUs.
An M
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They are correct that the base M1 and M2 are pretty low-performing as far as GPU performance goes.
Seems that plenty of people disagree.
I have no clue though, not interested in GPU arms races. I don't do anything except playing a game occasionally that requires a GPU
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I'm not trash talking the M1... the comparison of it vs. discrete GPUs is wildly unfair and silly.
The M1 is capable of ~2.6TFLOPS of FP32, which is frankly fucking fantastic for an integrated laptop GPU.
It's just not competitive against discrete GPUs with 1000s of cores.
2.6TFLOPS is actually plenty to play games (The Steam Deck only has 1.6TFLOPS and it gets along just fine)
And I've noticed that as long as I don't run at full
Exciting! (Score:2)
All 3 Mac gamers are going to be super excited by this news!