this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Gaming

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Mac gaming is right around the corner (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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"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."

The new software will allow Mac users* (see edit) to play 'Windows games' on their Apple silicon (M1/M2) devices. With development, this has the potential to bring gaming to Apple.

*EDIT: The Game Porting Toolkit is designed for developers to see how their game performs on Apple silicone to entice devs to create native ports. Thanks to commenters for pointing out this distinction. The CrossOver project on which it is built, I believe, is designed for end-users to run software on their Mac clients.

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[–] admin@honeyhive-u4873.vm.elestio.app 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

“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,”

So this is a real-time translation layer similar to how rosetta works? If this is working already and assuming that it works well, why would developers spend time making a native port when this is free and It Just Works^TM^

[–] sub_@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

why would developers spend time making a native port when this is free and It Just Works

Sadly it's not. IIRC:

  • the main part of this toolkit is to create an automated translation from DirectX 12, including the metal shader equivalents. However since the instructions / shades automatically generated, they are highly inefficient. Thus, they perform sub par (low framerate, buggy), and require developers to polish them, optimize them according to the machines. But large part of the job is done for them, at least for testing.

  • currently, in order to run those games, you need to download the exe file of the game, download dependencies, and run many commands manually from terminal, it's not user friendly at all. Also, it requires user to buy the Windows version of the game in the first place, thus the need to download windows version of steam, etc, etc.

[–] admin@honeyhive-u4873.vm.elestio.app 3 points 1 year ago

Ahh thanks for the context. I guess something like this can never be that easy, especially with the custom silicon that apples running now