Mac New Game Porting Toolkit is Wine
- Thread starter dada_dave
- Start date
Jimmyjames
Site Champ
- Posts
- 649
- Reaction score
- 741
I’m surprised and disappointed by some of the bad takes from prominent Mac bloggers and podcasters, regarding the gaming news yesterday.
Oh? I haven’t been paying attention. What are they saying? And who?
Jimmyjames
Site Champ
- Posts
- 649
- Reaction score
- 741
Siracusa and Quinn Nelson both trashing the announcements with a mixture of negativity and factual inaccuracy.
Siracusa stating apple silicon gpus are too weak because they aren’t 4090 essentially. Complaining games are too old. No one wants to play them because they already played on a pc. Most bizarrely, both John and Quinn stating we have the same announcements for gaming every year. Just totally wrong. Before last year, games were hardly mentioned for macs.
That’s unfortunate. I wrote a longer post bemoaning this attitude but I’m preaching to the choir.
KingOfPain
Site Champ
- Posts
- 262
- Reaction score
- 347
Andrew Tsai also has some details about this:
Jimmyjames
Site Champ
- Posts
- 649
- Reaction score
- 741
Ye
Yeah, I expect it from the usual contingent, but it’s a shame from Mac stalwarts.
Jimmyjames
Site Champ
- Posts
- 649
- Reaction score
- 741
I’d be interested in reading it, if it’s available.
WWDC 2023 should've, in my opinion, left people optimistic about the state of gaming on the Mac moving forwards. Yes it would've been better had Apple had shown this level of interest earlier and been farther along by now, but without time travel we can't fix that, so from the realm that Apple is starting to get serious about gaming, this was an excellent start. The most important aspects being shown off was that 1) Apple was getting involved in helping developers port their games to the Mac and 2) the behind the scenes engineering work to make games run smoother (game mode) and making game porting easier. Combine that with last years Metal 3 and we have a really good basis to enlarge the pool of Mac games and to do so more quickly than would otherwise be possible. This is way more important longterm than the few titles they decided to show at WWDC this year, though what they showed wasn't terrible either.
It's true that the highest level of Mac SOC, the M2 Ultra, doesn't reach 4090 levels of performance, but then neither does the AMD as far as I can tell ... and the 4090 is priced accordingly with more massive power requirements than anything else to boot. Halo products are good to have, but the M2 Ultra at 30% more power than the M1 is a very capable GPU and even more importantly every Mac comes with at least a decent GPU for gaming which is not true on the PC side. That means the potential market share for games is basically every Apple Silicon Mac. Further the low number of hardware options means support for the Mac platform is vastly cheaper than the PC. So Apple has a competitive graphics API, game modes for the OS, built in technology to help porting, is starting to get involved with developers porting, and has a growing user base that can pass minimum requirements for most games. This is on top of course the fact that iOS is one of the biggest markets for gaming (obviously it's evolved as a different market than PC games and while most of the frameworks are shared with the Mac and there are porting tools here, there are enough differences that the porting games from iOS to macOS is far from a given). Anyway, I don't expect the market to shift overnight and I can certainly understand if some developers want to make sure Apple is truly committed before making years long commitments to porting and support, but overall this is a really good foundation to build off of.
@Cmaier posted on the WWDC thread - codeweavers has a more official announcement:
www.codeweavers.com
Wine comes to macOS: Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit powered by CrossOver source code | CodeWeavers Blog
By Meredith Johnson | We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit.
www.codeweavers.com
Indeed as I said above I found the presentation quite positive for the long term implications of Mac gaming and am a little surprised by @Formerly_Jimmyjames ’ reporting of some well known Mac commenters missing the import of Apple’s announcements and jumping to the conclusion that this was some sort of desolate WWDC for games.
Ah I guess Andrew didn’t know when he made the video, news probably hadn’t gotten out, that it is indeed Wine/Crossover at the heart of the porting engine.
Nycturne
Elite Member
- Posts
- 1,135
- Reaction score
- 1,479
I honestly wasn't expecting them to build their own "Proton". That said, getting the platform vendor to adopt and maintain this sort of compatibility layer has advantages, like the tooling to help tune games using this for Metal rather than relying solely on the D3D compatibility. Also more likely that you won't get random breaks with major OS releases.
Did Crossover get Sherlocked here? Are they working with Crossover? I can't imagine that Crossover will be getting much direct business from game makers going forward after this.
It's not wrong though.I mean, Death Stranding on Mac is great, but I already played it on PlayStation a while ago. Why would I but it again? We need new games.
They are not working with Crossover (according to Crossover spokesperson at least), and I don't think that this will negatively affect Crossovers business. If anything, it will draw more attention since it has been now demonstrated that DX12 emulation on macOS is feasible.
Apple is not interested in these tools to be used to actually run games. I suppose this is why they avoided upstreaming the patches as well as keeping their DX12 implementation layer private. This is positioned strictly as a developer tool, lacks ergonomic players need, and restricted as such by the license agreement. A new Proton is the last thing Apple wants, since this would kill any potential for Mac gaming altogether.
Jimmyjames
Site Champ
- Posts
- 649
- Reaction score
- 741
I havent played it. Many people haven't but will now be able to. I simply don’t have room for multiple devices. Assuming everyone has is wrong.
I also feel their attitude makes the mistake of thinking things should go from 0-100 immediately. Given how bad things have been, it’s gonna take a long time. At first, yes, there will be older games. Who cares if they are good and we haven’t had them before? No one was porting any games just a couple of years ago. If we as a community show that there is a market there, new games will come. That is actually my biggest worry, that mac users have been so neglected, they won’t know how to respond to this abundance! In any case I wouldn’t be surprised to see more new games arrive, but yes, there will be some classics, simply because the catalog is so poor.
Last edited by a moderator:
Hmmm … could you expand on lacks ergonomics players need? I figured it was similar to having a Wine directory living on your computer and that developers could ship games to install and run there. But obviously that wouldn’t be as good as a native game thus most demanding games won’t until they can ship an appropriate version.
It is true that having easy built in porting tools based on emulation or translation can be a double edged sword for a platform. But the examples where it killed native app development and eventually the platform are all old and I do wonder if they are still applicable in today’s world where the technology and business have changed so much. Maybe they still are but I’m not sure.
Also, regardless I agree that the Crossover folks can use this as free advertising and even a form of seal of approval from Apple. There should be enough games and game companies out there who will need help even with Apple’s toolkit and Apple getting more involved that they should be okay financially - if anything Apple better make sure they are as they don’t want to kill the golden goose - at least not until those eggs are no longer necessary because every developer is writing native games on their own for the Mac (but that future is far past the foreseeable horizon that it would be a mistake to damage Crossover now).
Jimmyjames
Site Champ
- Posts
- 649
- Reaction score
- 741
It seems the better things get, the more angry they are! Strange.
Jimmyjames
Site Champ
- Posts
- 649
- Reaction score
- 741
A little more information from one of the devs of the porting kit
mastodon.gamedev.place
And a message about how Apple sees macs and gaming
mastodon.gamedev.place
Gokhan Avkarogullari (@gavkar@mastodon.gamedev.place)
@yiningkarlli @aras @romainguy@androiddev.social we built a dxil to metallib converter and directx11 and directx12 to Metal runtime translator. Non graphics APIs are translated by Wine. But we don’t use any tech from moltenVK or DXVK or spirv-cross etc. The shader converter can be shipped by...
Gokhan Avkarogullari (@gavkar@mastodon.gamedev.place)
Our Metal Ecosystem team took the technology and have made them available to the developers in a way that is easy use and integrate . Macs are perfect game machines. Great GPUs, CPUs, memory bandwidth, storage, audio, video, display and they are quiet, fast, with long battery life.
