22 ms·

Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

354 points by ghuntley 3y ago

rldjbpin 3y ago
apple is getting too much credit for this. they are essentially bootstrapping on the long-term efforts made at winehq. i would like to know what value-add they have done besides making it work better at os level. i would be more impressed if they contributed to improving the translation itself like valve has done with the proton project and by contributing directly to the main project.
akasakahakada 3y ago
Why is that people start talking about VR game or stuff? You can't play any VR in 720p 15fps, so they just assuming magic happens?
chrisldgk 3y ago
Am I the only person wondering why they wouldn’t demo medium/high settings on a higher framerate? Being able to run at ultra at all is quite cool, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if you were able to run the game with 60fps at all? Is there something I’m missing?
moi2388 3y ago
Well, I tried running it on my MBP M1 Max 64gb and whilst it works great (in low res, it does not go max on 4K with acceptable fps), it gets really hot. Just don’t game on a laptop.
thih9 3y ago
What is the game porting toolkit? Is this something that game devs would use or is this some wrapper or emulation layer for the end user? Is there a list of games that use it?
- cromka 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222266
- Aaargh20318 3y ago
  Apparently it’s a emulator like Proton as used by Steam to run Windows games on Linux. It even uses Rosetta to run x86_64 core on ARM. But it’s not intended for end users. Instead it’s intended for developers to evaluate how their game would run on macOS so they can decide wether or not to port it.
  - gilgoomesh 3y ago
    According to CodeWeavers, it is based on their CrossOver code (GPL 2.1) and can be committed back into Wine: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-comes-to-macos-apple-s-game-porting-toolkit-powered-by-crossover-source-code https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-come...
    - microtonal 3y ago
      It uses a proprietary framework that implements Direct3D on top of Metal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224057
      - nailer 3y ago
        Your link confirmed that it uses wine. And your description sounds exactly like how codeWeavers wine implements direct 3D upon opengl. I imagine it’s simply a proprietary product based on liberally licensed (LGPL) open source code, much in the same way Safari was built upon KHTML.
        microtonal 3y ago
        Sure it uses Wine, but the Direct3D API is handled by the proprietary D3DMetal framework, which implements Direct3D on top of Metal. This is different than CodeWeaver's CrossOver approach, which uses Wine's DirectX-on-Vulkan implementation and then MoltenVK to run Vulkan on Metal. So, it is not just Wine. It is Wine plus a large proprietary Apple Framework that has most of the Direct3D magic sauce.
gilgoomesh 3y ago
Keep in mind, it's getting 15fps at 1440x900. It's not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 is a great experience. It's merely pointing out that it's technically possible (which is a massive achievement).
- demarq 3y ago
  all while being emulated on rosetta
- trevyn 3y ago
  Not as massive an achievement as Proton getting nearly every Windows game in existence running well from unmodified binaries on Linux.
  - yurishimo 3y ago
    Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Think about how many Steam Decks have been sold. Game devs are already actively targeting the Deck. If porting games to Mac can be made easier, we all need to actively encourage it. Unfortunately, the only way we get Apple to give us more game dev tools is by porting the games. I have a Steam Deck and a Mac. I would love to play half the games from my Deck on my laptop.
    - icapybara 3y ago
      Do you find this is a good solution for playing Steam games? I have an older PC, and I'm thinking about replacing it with a macbook air and a steam deck. Does the steam deck feel more limiting than just having a windows PC with steam?
      - LegitShady 3y ago
        only get a steam deck if you're really interested in portable playing. You can build a better desktop from old parts. The steamdeck is an interesting device that's doing a lot for gaming via proton, but that makes tradeoffs for battery life and portability. If you're not interested in the portability just get a desktop. If you're interested in the portability but need a large screen, get a laptop. If you want a sega game gear form factor that can run steam games get a steam deck.
eliasmacpherson 3y ago
Fantastic would be 25fps, this isn't there yet.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  The tool is not meant to be used for that. It is fantastic in the sense that it was achieved with no changes to the game whatsoever. I'm wondering if this is also translating the binary with Rosetta.
  - eliasmacpherson 3y ago
    Well if there are no changes made to the game whatsoever, then it has to be using Rosetta. Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.
    - manuelabeledo 3y ago
      DXVK does not support DirectX 12, and does only half of the job, missing the CPU instruction translations.
      - eliasmacpherson 3y ago
        I was referring to the performance of DXVK not its feature support. Expecting DXVK to do Rosetta itself is beyond ridiculous.
        manuelabeledo 3y ago
        I agree: comparing Rosetta plus the graphics API translation layer, with DXVK, which only accomplishes the latter, is ridiculous. Here is what you said, though: > Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.
        eliasmacpherson 3y ago
atgctg 3y ago
Running at ~40 fps on M2 Max: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpunk_on_m2_max_wgame_porting_toolkit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...
- akmarinov 3y ago
  Nice, imagine all these games on an iPad…
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    On iPad they would need their controls redone; it's possible, but an extra step. I'm also getting the feeling the ipad is quickly running out of favor, I haven't seen one in ages except on my parents' dinner table.
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      You can pair your XBox or Playstation controller with an iPad.
      - reportgunner 3y ago
        Those are terrible controls for most of games.
        ninkendo 3y ago
        You can pair a mouse and keyboard with an iPad too. You can even plug them in…
        akmarinov 3y ago
        Only for RTS, most other games actually favor the controller due to the included aim assist in FPS games, for example. Having to be on console makes pretty much any game controller compliant.
whizzter 3y ago
This actually makes me wonder if I should sell my Apple stocks, that they even put out something like this (even if only as an "evaluation tool" and based on CrossOvers GPL code) screams as an validation that there is enough developers ignoring Apple/Metal that they're actually starting to hurt from a lack of titles. Sure, everyone doing Unity or Unreal will probably have the middleware take care of the biggest differences and Vulkan being too verbose has kept back the field, but given a choice Metal will still be an afterthought for those making custom engines. One could hope for updated OpenGL/Vulkan support, but nobody is holding their breath anymore.
- metmac 3y ago
  I think this response lacks the context of the current state of the video game industry. In my mind this is no different than nVidia providing white glove engineering support and optimizations for titles to run on their GPUS. There is a reason nVidia has generally won the consumer GPU arms race over the years over AMD. They go out of their way to support studios and titles, compared to what AMD does imho. It shows that Apple recognizes it needs to lower the barrier of entry for studios to considering targeting Macs. Because compared to the larger gaming market most studios have very little incentive to build and maintain this because Mac’s could account for 1-3% of your player base. Is that worth 1-5 ICs worth of time if you are a small studio. Probably not.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    They also need to focus more on backwards compatibility. If Apple continually makes most of my library unplayable as they have done repeatedly (Classic, Rosetta 1, 32bit) then I wouldn't trust them with gaming. It seems moving forward PlayStation and Xbox are making it a priority, it already was on PC and I don't think Apple will ever have anything with the draw of Nintendo that could surmount that.
    - sylens 3y ago
      This is a huge draw in PC gaming. People love going back to old games and modding them or updating them to run better. Heck, didn't Portal (a 2007 game) just get an RTX update?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Version467 3y ago
This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Yes, thank you. I mean, let's have a bit of context. I'm Mac based (well, my computing is, I'm still biological ;) ) and I took an interest in what's happening in the AI space. Knowing that RAM and CPU would be bottlenecks but that there would be open source ways to run stuff, I got a Mac Studio, which is M1 Ultra and 128G of RAM, which then becomes also GPU RAM because on M1 the architecture is like that. So I'm able to do AI stuff up to the heavy-lifting stuff (still steadily downloading LLaMA data on my old DSL, but I've got everything but 65B and have run 7B, 13B and 30B without issue, and of course I'm having no trouble running Stable Diffusion stuff) If a basic laptop with just an M1 and laptop amounts of RAM can do 15 fps at 1400x900, my 20-core M1 Ultra with 128G of RAM ought to do at least that at 3840x1600 on my big ol' curved monitor. And at that point it starts acting like the PC gamer experience, except at no point did I set out to make a gamer-specific system. The whole thing was put together to serve very much other purposes, and retains usefulness for those purposes. I'm sure I can tolerate pleb tier 30 fps or not being on Ultra settings or something, to get performance that's very similar to decent gaming rigs on games designed for Windows PCs, on a machine I got to serve entirely other purposes.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    A lot of us with the financial means to buy a Mac Studio are also old and are "PatientGamers" and fire up games like Skyrim from time-to-time and don't chase after the latest AAA titles. Even 10-15 years ago I used to a have a $200 limit on graphics cards and roughly $100 limit on CPUs and would wait to play games on highest resolution until it was a few years later and I went through a hardware refresh cycle, always staying about 2 years behind. I've never bought a $1000 GPU for a gaming rig. At the same time I find this interesting that Apple is clearly starting to notice the PC gaming market. Makes me wonder if they're going to start a more serious push soon, and if we might see some changes and repair the relationship that Apple has with AAA studios. [Edit: And another thought is that with virtual iPhone saturation in the US market, Apple may be facing the economic reality that in order to grow they need to enter into other markets like gaming, and this may as well be a necessary part of the long-term Vision Pro strategy]
DCKing 3y ago
From what I gather, Game Porting Toolkit is two things - a fork of Wine, and their own adaptation/extension of open source projects for DirectX compatibility. Some observations: Windows compatibility: * Windows platform compatibility is achieved with a slightly patched version of Codeweavers' Wine fork - virtually all of the hard work of Windows compatibility has been achieved by the Wine developers and Codeweavers and was already available open source before today. * Interestingly, Apple is distributing this thing as a Homebrew library. Has Apple ever done this before? [1] DirectX compatibility: * In addition, outside of the core Wine based stuff, there's a framework called D3DMetal.framework. This is a DirectX 9-12 compatibility layer akin to DXVK used in Proton as a compatibility layer from DirectX 9-11 to Vulkan. This is what seems to be the game changer here compared to before. Before today, running DirectX on macOS was possible but lost a lot of performance and compatibility needing to go through Apple's old OpenGL support or a third party Vulkan intermediary layer in MoltenVK. This is direct (heh) first party Direct3D to Metal translation. * Actually, it's more than "akin to DXVK". The D3DMetal.framework contains copyright attribution to DXVK as required under their MIT license. It's quite likely Apple ported a lot of DXVK to Metal. It's worth noting that DXVK itself doesn't support Direct3D 12 though, Proton uses another LGPL2.1 licensed library called VKD3D for that. * However, D3DMetal.framework is very much not open source itself. Its license is actually very restrictive, seemingly only permitting use for game development/QA use cases. [2] * The restrictive license seems to make it harder for someone like Valve to use this akin to how they use Proton on Linux in a sanctioned way. Apple seems intent on preventing developers from dumping their games on macOS with just their compatibility layer. It definitely won't stop hobbyists making better tools to continue run Windows games on Macs though. * The fact that D3DMetal.framework appears to support DirectX 9 and 10 is interesting. No new commercial efforts use those anymore, so that's just there for what? Allowing homebrewers to run their 00s era Windows games? [1]: https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula [2]: It contains a license with the following language - "you are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, personal copyright license to (i) install, internally use, and test the Apple Software for the sole purpose of developing, testing, or evaluating video games for use on Apple-branded products".
- mort96 3y ago
yreg 3y ago
As John Siracusa discussed on this week's ATP[0], it's incredible how much effort Apple puts into this considering the result. Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware and the hardware is also amazing for the power envelopes it is wrapped in. But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners. Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival? I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all. [0] https://atp.fm/538 https://atp.fm/538 @1:42:20
- DCKing 3y ago
  > Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware I think saying "its own parallel gaming stack" probably gives them too much credit [1]. Yes - they put in significant effort, but their gaming stack is neither "parallel" to the rest of the world, nor "their own" in any real sense. They seem to have adapted the open source efforts of Codeweavers, Valve, Wine and the broader Linux community put in Proton and achieving Windows games compatibility on Linux with Vulkan. Adapting that for Metal is no small feat [2] but an investment a giant like Apple can easily make without much risks. Don't forget that Wine has always been developed for Linux and macOS (and the BSDs) in parallel too - it was right there for the taking. [1]: I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing in the last five years. [2]: At a technical level Metal and Vulkan are actually similar enough, but there's just a lot of surface to cover and edge cases to get right.
  - yreg 3y ago
    Metal itself is the parallel stack, no? Granted, Metal is to a degree useful for the casual iOS games where alone Apple probably makes more money than anyone else in the gaming industry. >I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing The podcaster does acknowledge that as well, I just didn't quote that part. The whole "rant" has about 4 minutes. But thanks for providing context, it is important.
renewiltord 3y ago
How are Wine and friends actually legal considering the Oracle v Google thing on Java? I've always loved it but really do wonder. That was a blasphemous verdict.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
  >> How are Wine and friends actually legal considering the Oracle v Google thing on Java? >> I've always loved it but really do wonder. That was a blasphemous verdict. So you think APIs and interfaces should be copyrightable despite decades of precedent? If so, Oracle owes IBM a huge amount of damages for using SQL in Oracle database software without a license.
- nrclark 3y ago
  Google won that in the end. It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Oh they did? Well, that’s good news. Something is good in this world.
  - nilptr 3y ago
    Won for now. Supreme Court decisions are reversible in time.
getcrunk 3y ago
This guy got 30-40fps, idk what settings. https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpunk_on_m2_max_wgame_porting_toolkit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...
- rsynnott 3y ago
  That's on an M2 Max, which is a significantly heftier chip than the M1.
veave 3y ago
This is about DirectX 12. How's the support for d3d9 through dxvk like for end users?
christoph 3y ago
This is total speculation on my part, but I do wonder why Apple have suddenly got this out the door to developers right at the same moment their headset is announced. They’ve never seemed very interested in this section of the games market before. I wonder if this could be the first building block of allowing existing modern 3D games to play in some kind of new semi immersive way inside. I’m imagining playing an FPS on a huge wrap around screen with some adjustable depth perception. That could potentially open up a huge market.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- akmarinov 3y ago
  VR’s biggest use case is gaming and Apple is so far away from gaming, they’re not in the same universe. If they want people to game on their headset - they need devs to port their games over.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I think more than gaming porn is the current killer use of 360 VR tech. More on that later. I’ve always believed VRs biggest use case in the end is work, but resolution and integration to the surrounding environment has been lacking. Have a 360 3D environment to work in, assuming resolution is high enough to read text, opens a lot of possibilities up. Ive done a fair amount of POC with various devices over the years and I stand by that. The gesture recognition of the new apple devices leads more in that direction IMO. For instance, it should be able to key (harhar) off a virtual keyboard being typed on. (Haptics will be an issue!) I’d note also that VR has been successful in high end manufacturing design as well for these reasons. I think gaming is what proves a tech and motivates people to engage. On the shadier side, porn even more so. But these technologies wend their ways into all aspects of our lives after being proven out in the game / porn use cases.
- boringg 3y ago
  This is an actually interesting use of the headset. Price tag at this state to high for most users -- but imagine it dropped down to something reasonable. Throw in your favorite game and the immersive experience would be pretty slick. You are definitely correct -- they are opening the door for gaming on that system though they are doing it quietly not to get competition up in arms.
AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
Man if Apple somehow could have their own Windows emulation layer similar to Valve's Steamdeck developments - I could see myself returning to the Mac. It would be so amazing. The Mac would become truly a gaming platform, regardless if it costs twice the price of an equivalent PC - since people who appreciate Apple's hardware and software will see its value. Having said that there's still the issue of upgrades. But again, I have to replace pretty much my entire PC every 5 years (new CPU needs a new mobo, needs new RAMs etc). So hmm. edit: as an aside an interesting question.. I wonder if Valve's efforts, having incentivized developers to make their games more Steamdeck compatible - and hence more "predictable" in terms of how they access Windows APIs - would also make it easier for Apple to translate the games - even if the target is different.
- scotty79 3y ago
  Yeah but how can you stick a gtx 3090 in a Mac?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ece 3y ago
    In the new Mac pro..
    - Hamuko 3y ago
      There haven't been Nvidia drivers for macOS for years. Maybe since like the GTX 900 series?
      - ece 3y ago
        Yeah, Apple could build their own nvk-like for Metal driver at this point if they cared about any GPU other than their own. Nvk/mesa itself might enable Linux gaming on Mac pros with 3rd party cards.. one day.
    - o1y32 3y ago
izacus 3y ago
So... why is this not an end-user product like Proton on SteamOS? Is this actually going to do anything for Mac gaming considering it's only meant for game developers for... testing? What kind of workflow is Apple envisioning here?
- Hamuko 3y ago
  As far as I can tell (as not a game developer) from the introduction videos is that the game porting toolkit / Wine is designed to shorten the time it takes to get a first macOS version of your game running and to evaluate how well does it run. A (near) zero-effort rough draft of your potential macOS port. They show that previously you'd have to take the Windows version, port the source code, port the HLSL shaders, implement graphics/audio/input/HDR and then you'd be able to get a first running version of your game that you could evaluate. And now with the Wine tool, you'd take the Windows version, run it through the Wine tool and then you'd have the first running version version of the game to evaluate. And you can then evaluate what parts of the games run good and which don't, is it utilising the GPU properly, and so on. And if you decide that there's potential in the macOS version, you'd then start doing all of the stuff that was previously required to get the first running version.
golergka 3y ago
When people discuss Apple efforts in gaming, they tend to forget that this company owns second largest in the world, after Android, game platform. And with Vision, they could easily become the largest VR gaming platform in the world, even though this might not be the immediate focus upon release — but iPhone didn't have any games on release either. Mentioning partnership with Unity in Vision announcement presentation is very significant. It is the most used game engine in the world (especially if you count by game installations) which dominates mobile market, and it has been developing VR/AR capabilities for many years now, even though it arguably doesn't have the same AAA graphics as Unreal.
nhggfu 3y ago
why does it look laggy and verging on unplayable, i wonder?
- dagmx 3y ago
  Because they’re running it at Ultra on the lowest end hardware configuration, with an x86_64 to arm64 translation, and a shader translation and a windows api wrapper. For comparison, the M1 was routinely benchmarked in NVIDIA 1050 TI to 1070 territory depending on the benchmark. This is only a few fps behind native.
tantalor 3y ago
I guess the video looks okay but the Twitter embed video quality is dog shit. Maybe post the video somewhere like YouTube instead that supports higher quality.
Animats 3y ago
Direct-X 12 support, but not Vulkan?
nazka 3y ago
I truly wonder if Microsoft didn’t help with this port. Looking at the speed and quality of this port. It seems that Apple and Microsoft are working closer than ever. Maybe some execs of Microsoft asked for to be in this demo.
- gigel82 3y ago
  Insert Bike Fall Meme here :)
bogwog 3y ago
Look at all the time and effort spent to port Wine when all they had to do to win over developers was officially support OpenGL and Vulkan.
GravityLabs 3y ago
This is my daily driver device and Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best video games I've ever played, so this has me very excited. Would love to take a break from code to play a few minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the same device I daily drive...
sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago
Oh, cool! You can use a tool to make a computer game barely run on an overpriced computer? I will never, ever understand the appeal of Apple products.
jacooper 3y ago
Have people here not tried Proton and DXVK? This is not impressive at all
yieldcrv 3y ago
nice proof of concept about the highest settings, gamers only care about 60fps minimum so should probably find/post a tweet showing those settings then gamers will move the goalpost to cost of the machine, but thats okay
CostcoFanboy 3y ago
95% lift by CodeWeavers, but Apple is the one to thank. Lmao.
justinclift 3y ago
13 FPS, so not really "playable" at Ultra settings for that resolution. That being said, that it works at all is pretty amazing. :)
- culopatin 3y ago
  I wonder what it plays like at more modest settings
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Yeah, it could probably be made playable. :)

354 points by ghuntley 3y ago

apple is getting too much credit for this. they are essentially bootstrapping on the long-term efforts made at winehq. i would like to know what value-add they have done besides making it work better at os level. i would be more impressed if they contributed to improving the translation itself like valve has done with the proton project and by contributing directly to the main project.

akasakahakada 3y ago

Why is that people start talking about VR game or stuff? You can't play any VR in 720p 15fps, so they just assuming magic happens?

chrisldgk 3y ago

Am I the only person wondering why they wouldn’t demo medium/high settings on a higher framerate? Being able to run at ultra at all is quite cool, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if you were able to run the game with 60fps at all? Is there something I’m missing?

moi2388 3y ago

Well, I tried running it on my MBP M1 Max 64gb and whilst it works great (in low res, it does not go max on 4K with acceptable fps), it gets really hot. Just don’t game on a laptop.

thih9 3y ago

What is the game porting toolkit? Is this something that game devs would use or is this some wrapper or emulation layer for the end user? Is there a list of games that use it?

cromka 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222266
Aaargh20318 3y ago
Apparently it’s a emulator like Proton as used by Steam to run Windows games on Linux. It even uses Rosetta to run x86_64 core on ARM. But it’s not intended for end users. Instead it’s intended for developers to evaluate how their game would run on macOS so they can decide wether or not to port it.
- gilgoomesh 3y ago
  According to CodeWeavers, it is based on their CrossOver code (GPL 2.1) and can be committed back into Wine: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-comes-to-macos-apple-s-game-porting-toolkit-powered-by-crossover-source-code https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-come...
  - microtonal 3y ago
    It uses a proprietary framework that implements Direct3D on top of Metal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224057
    - nailer 3y ago
      Your link confirmed that it uses wine. And your description sounds exactly like how codeWeavers wine implements direct 3D upon opengl. I imagine it’s simply a proprietary product based on liberally licensed (LGPL) open source code, much in the same way Safari was built upon KHTML.
      - microtonal 3y ago
        Sure it uses Wine, but the Direct3D API is handled by the proprietary D3DMetal framework, which implements Direct3D on top of Metal. This is different than CodeWeaver's CrossOver approach, which uses Wine's DirectX-on-Vulkan implementation and then MoltenVK to run Vulkan on Metal. So, it is not just Wine. It is Wine plus a large proprietary Apple Framework that has most of the Direct3D magic sauce.

gilgoomesh 3y ago

Keep in mind, it's getting 15fps at 1440x900. It's not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 is a great experience. It's merely pointing out that it's technically possible (which is a massive achievement).

demarq 3y ago
all while being emulated on rosetta
trevyn 3y ago
Not as massive an achievement as Proton getting nearly every Windows game in existence running well from unmodified binaries on Linux.
- yurishimo 3y ago
  Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Think about how many Steam Decks have been sold. Game devs are already actively targeting the Deck. If porting games to Mac can be made easier, we all need to actively encourage it. Unfortunately, the only way we get Apple to give us more game dev tools is by porting the games. I have a Steam Deck and a Mac. I would love to play half the games from my Deck on my laptop.
  - icapybara 3y ago
    Do you find this is a good solution for playing Steam games? I have an older PC, and I'm thinking about replacing it with a macbook air and a steam deck. Does the steam deck feel more limiting than just having a windows PC with steam?
    - LegitShady 3y ago
      only get a steam deck if you're really interested in portable playing. You can build a better desktop from old parts. The steamdeck is an interesting device that's doing a lot for gaming via proton, but that makes tradeoffs for battery life and portability. If you're not interested in the portability just get a desktop. If you're interested in the portability but need a large screen, get a laptop. If you want a sega game gear form factor that can run steam games get a steam deck.

eliasmacpherson 3y ago

Fantastic would be 25fps, this isn't there yet.

manuelabeledo 3y ago
The tool is not meant to be used for that. It is fantastic in the sense that it was achieved with no changes to the game whatsoever. I'm wondering if this is also translating the binary with Rosetta.
- eliasmacpherson 3y ago
  Well if there are no changes made to the game whatsoever, then it has to be using Rosetta. Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    DXVK does not support DirectX 12, and does only half of the job, missing the CPU instruction translations.
    - eliasmacpherson 3y ago
      I was referring to the performance of DXVK not its feature support. Expecting DXVK to do Rosetta itself is beyond ridiculous.
      - manuelabeledo 3y ago
        I agree: comparing Rosetta plus the graphics API translation layer, with DXVK, which only accomplishes the latter, is ridiculous. Here is what you said, though: > Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.
        eliasmacpherson 3y ago

atgctg 3y ago

Running at ~40 fps on M2 Max: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpunk_on_m2_max_wgame_porting_toolkit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...

akmarinov 3y ago
Nice, imagine all these games on an iPad…
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  On iPad they would need their controls redone; it's possible, but an extra step. I'm also getting the feeling the ipad is quickly running out of favor, I haven't seen one in ages except on my parents' dinner table.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    You can pair your XBox or Playstation controller with an iPad.
    - reportgunner 3y ago
      Those are terrible controls for most of games.
      - ninkendo 3y ago
        You can pair a mouse and keyboard with an iPad too. You can even plug them in…
      - akmarinov 3y ago
        Only for RTS, most other games actually favor the controller due to the included aim assist in FPS games, for example. Having to be on console makes pretty much any game controller compliant.

whizzter 3y ago

This actually makes me wonder if I should sell my Apple stocks, that they even put out something like this (even if only as an "evaluation tool" and based on CrossOvers GPL code) screams as an validation that there is enough developers ignoring Apple/Metal that they're actually starting to hurt from a lack of titles. Sure, everyone doing Unity or Unreal will probably have the middleware take care of the biggest differences and Vulkan being too verbose has kept back the field, but given a choice Metal will still be an afterthought for those making custom engines. One could hope for updated OpenGL/Vulkan support, but nobody is holding their breath anymore.

metmac 3y ago
I think this response lacks the context of the current state of the video game industry. In my mind this is no different than nVidia providing white glove engineering support and optimizations for titles to run on their GPUS. There is a reason nVidia has generally won the consumer GPU arms race over the years over AMD. They go out of their way to support studios and titles, compared to what AMD does imho. It shows that Apple recognizes it needs to lower the barrier of entry for studios to considering targeting Macs. Because compared to the larger gaming market most studios have very little incentive to build and maintain this because Mac’s could account for 1-3% of your player base. Is that worth 1-5 ICs worth of time if you are a small studio. Probably not.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  They also need to focus more on backwards compatibility. If Apple continually makes most of my library unplayable as they have done repeatedly (Classic, Rosetta 1, 32bit) then I wouldn't trust them with gaming. It seems moving forward PlayStation and Xbox are making it a priority, it already was on PC and I don't think Apple will ever have anything with the draw of Nintendo that could surmount that.
  - sylens 3y ago
    This is a huge draw in PC gaming. People love going back to old games and modding them or updating them to run better. Heck, didn't Portal (a 2007 game) just get an RTX update?

deleted 3y ago

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Version467 3y ago

This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.

Applejinx 3y ago
Yes, thank you. I mean, let's have a bit of context. I'm Mac based (well, my computing is, I'm still biological ;) ) and I took an interest in what's happening in the AI space. Knowing that RAM and CPU would be bottlenecks but that there would be open source ways to run stuff, I got a Mac Studio, which is M1 Ultra and 128G of RAM, which then becomes also GPU RAM because on M1 the architecture is like that. So I'm able to do AI stuff up to the heavy-lifting stuff (still steadily downloading LLaMA data on my old DSL, but I've got everything but 65B and have run 7B, 13B and 30B without issue, and of course I'm having no trouble running Stable Diffusion stuff) If a basic laptop with just an M1 and laptop amounts of RAM can do 15 fps at 1400x900, my 20-core M1 Ultra with 128G of RAM ought to do at least that at 3840x1600 on my big ol' curved monitor. And at that point it starts acting like the PC gamer experience, except at no point did I set out to make a gamer-specific system. The whole thing was put together to serve very much other purposes, and retains usefulness for those purposes. I'm sure I can tolerate pleb tier 30 fps or not being on Ultra settings or something, to get performance that's very similar to decent gaming rigs on games designed for Windows PCs, on a machine I got to serve entirely other purposes.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  A lot of us with the financial means to buy a Mac Studio are also old and are "PatientGamers" and fire up games like Skyrim from time-to-time and don't chase after the latest AAA titles. Even 10-15 years ago I used to a have a $200 limit on graphics cards and roughly $100 limit on CPUs and would wait to play games on highest resolution until it was a few years later and I went through a hardware refresh cycle, always staying about 2 years behind. I've never bought a $1000 GPU for a gaming rig. At the same time I find this interesting that Apple is clearly starting to notice the PC gaming market. Makes me wonder if they're going to start a more serious push soon, and if we might see some changes and repair the relationship that Apple has with AAA studios. [Edit: And another thought is that with virtual iPhone saturation in the US market, Apple may be facing the economic reality that in order to grow they need to enter into other markets like gaming, and this may as well be a necessary part of the long-term Vision Pro strategy]

DCKing 3y ago

From what I gather, Game Porting Toolkit is two things - a fork of Wine, and their own adaptation/extension of open source projects for DirectX compatibility. Some observations: Windows compatibility: * Windows platform compatibility is achieved with a slightly patched version of Codeweavers' Wine fork - virtually all of the hard work of Windows compatibility has been achieved by the Wine developers and Codeweavers and was already available open source before today. * Interestingly, Apple is distributing this thing as a Homebrew library. Has Apple ever done this before? [1] DirectX compatibility: * In addition, outside of the core Wine based stuff, there's a framework called D3DMetal.framework. This is a DirectX 9-12 compatibility layer akin to DXVK used in Proton as a compatibility layer from DirectX 9-11 to Vulkan. This is what seems to be the game changer here compared to before. Before today, running DirectX on macOS was possible but lost a lot of performance and compatibility needing to go through Apple's old OpenGL support or a third party Vulkan intermediary layer in MoltenVK. This is direct (heh) first party Direct3D to Metal translation. * Actually, it's more than "akin to DXVK". The D3DMetal.framework contains copyright attribution to DXVK as required under their MIT license. It's quite likely Apple ported a lot of DXVK to Metal. It's worth noting that DXVK itself doesn't support Direct3D 12 though, Proton uses another LGPL2.1 licensed library called VKD3D for that. * However, D3DMetal.framework is very much not open source itself. Its license is actually very restrictive, seemingly only permitting use for game development/QA use cases. [2] * The restrictive license seems to make it harder for someone like Valve to use this akin to how they use Proton on Linux in a sanctioned way. Apple seems intent on preventing developers from dumping their games on macOS with just their compatibility layer. It definitely won't stop hobbyists making better tools to continue run Windows games on Macs though. * The fact that D3DMetal.framework appears to support DirectX 9 and 10 is interesting. No new commercial efforts use those anymore, so that's just there for what? Allowing homebrewers to run their 00s era Windows games? [1]: https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula [2]: It contains a license with the following language - "you are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, personal copyright license to (i) install, internally use, and test the Apple Software for the sole purpose of developing, testing, or evaluating video games for use on Apple-branded products".

mort96 3y ago

yreg 3y ago

As John Siracusa discussed on this week's ATP[0], it's incredible how much effort Apple puts into this considering the result. Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware and the hardware is also amazing for the power envelopes it is wrapped in. But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners. Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival? I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all. [0] https://atp.fm/538 https://atp.fm/538 @1:42:20

DCKing 3y ago
> Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware I think saying "its own parallel gaming stack" probably gives them too much credit [1]. Yes - they put in significant effort, but their gaming stack is neither "parallel" to the rest of the world, nor "their own" in any real sense. They seem to have adapted the open source efforts of Codeweavers, Valve, Wine and the broader Linux community put in Proton and achieving Windows games compatibility on Linux with Vulkan. Adapting that for Metal is no small feat [2] but an investment a giant like Apple can easily make without much risks. Don't forget that Wine has always been developed for Linux and macOS (and the BSDs) in parallel too - it was right there for the taking. [1]: I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing in the last five years. [2]: At a technical level Metal and Vulkan are actually similar enough, but there's just a lot of surface to cover and edge cases to get right.
- yreg 3y ago
  Metal itself is the parallel stack, no? Granted, Metal is to a degree useful for the casual iOS games where alone Apple probably makes more money than anyone else in the gaming industry. >I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing The podcaster does acknowledge that as well, I just didn't quote that part. The whole "rant" has about 4 minutes. But thanks for providing context, it is important.

renewiltord 3y ago

How are Wine and friends actually legal considering the Oracle v Google thing on Java? I've always loved it but really do wonder. That was a blasphemous verdict.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
>> How are Wine and friends actually legal considering the Oracle v Google thing on Java? >> I've always loved it but really do wonder. That was a blasphemous verdict. So you think APIs and interfaces should be copyrightable despite decades of precedent? If so, Oracle owes IBM a huge amount of damages for using SQL in Oracle database software without a license.
nrclark 3y ago
Google won that in the end. It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Oh they did? Well, that’s good news. Something is good in this world.
- nilptr 3y ago
  Won for now. Supreme Court decisions are reversible in time.

getcrunk 3y ago

This guy got 30-40fps, idk what settings. https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpunk_on_m2_max_wgame_porting_toolkit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...

rsynnott 3y ago
That's on an M2 Max, which is a significantly heftier chip than the M1.

veave 3y ago

This is about DirectX 12. How's the support for d3d9 through dxvk like for end users?

christoph 3y ago

This is total speculation on my part, but I do wonder why Apple have suddenly got this out the door to developers right at the same moment their headset is announced. They’ve never seemed very interested in this section of the games market before. I wonder if this could be the first building block of allowing existing modern 3D games to play in some kind of new semi immersive way inside. I’m imagining playing an FPS on a huge wrap around screen with some adjustable depth perception. That could potentially open up a huge market.

deleted 3y ago
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akmarinov 3y ago
VR’s biggest use case is gaming and Apple is so far away from gaming, they’re not in the same universe. If they want people to game on their headset - they need devs to port their games over.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I think more than gaming porn is the current killer use of 360 VR tech. More on that later. I’ve always believed VRs biggest use case in the end is work, but resolution and integration to the surrounding environment has been lacking. Have a 360 3D environment to work in, assuming resolution is high enough to read text, opens a lot of possibilities up. Ive done a fair amount of POC with various devices over the years and I stand by that. The gesture recognition of the new apple devices leads more in that direction IMO. For instance, it should be able to key (harhar) off a virtual keyboard being typed on. (Haptics will be an issue!) I’d note also that VR has been successful in high end manufacturing design as well for these reasons. I think gaming is what proves a tech and motivates people to engage. On the shadier side, porn even more so. But these technologies wend their ways into all aspects of our lives after being proven out in the game / porn use cases.
boringg 3y ago
This is an actually interesting use of the headset. Price tag at this state to high for most users -- but imagine it dropped down to something reasonable. Throw in your favorite game and the immersive experience would be pretty slick. You are definitely correct -- they are opening the door for gaming on that system though they are doing it quietly not to get competition up in arms.

AltruisticGapHN 3y ago

Man if Apple somehow could have their own Windows emulation layer similar to Valve's Steamdeck developments - I could see myself returning to the Mac. It would be so amazing. The Mac would become truly a gaming platform, regardless if it costs twice the price of an equivalent PC - since people who appreciate Apple's hardware and software will see its value. Having said that there's still the issue of upgrades. But again, I have to replace pretty much my entire PC every 5 years (new CPU needs a new mobo, needs new RAMs etc). So hmm. edit: as an aside an interesting question.. I wonder if Valve's efforts, having incentivized developers to make their games more Steamdeck compatible - and hence more "predictable" in terms of how they access Windows APIs - would also make it easier for Apple to translate the games - even if the target is different.

scotty79 3y ago
Yeah but how can you stick a gtx 3090 in a Mac?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ece 3y ago
  In the new Mac pro..
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    There haven't been Nvidia drivers for macOS for years. Maybe since like the GTX 900 series?
    - ece 3y ago
      Yeah, Apple could build their own nvk-like for Metal driver at this point if they cared about any GPU other than their own. Nvk/mesa itself might enable Linux gaming on Mac pros with 3rd party cards.. one day.
  - o1y32 3y ago

izacus 3y ago

So... why is this not an end-user product like Proton on SteamOS? Is this actually going to do anything for Mac gaming considering it's only meant for game developers for... testing? What kind of workflow is Apple envisioning here?

Hamuko 3y ago
As far as I can tell (as not a game developer) from the introduction videos is that the game porting toolkit / Wine is designed to shorten the time it takes to get a first macOS version of your game running and to evaluate how well does it run. A (near) zero-effort rough draft of your potential macOS port. They show that previously you'd have to take the Windows version, port the source code, port the HLSL shaders, implement graphics/audio/input/HDR and then you'd be able to get a first running version of your game that you could evaluate. And now with the Wine tool, you'd take the Windows version, run it through the Wine tool and then you'd have the first running version version of the game to evaluate. And you can then evaluate what parts of the games run good and which don't, is it utilising the GPU properly, and so on. And if you decide that there's potential in the macOS version, you'd then start doing all of the stuff that was previously required to get the first running version.

golergka 3y ago

When people discuss Apple efforts in gaming, they tend to forget that this company owns second largest in the world, after Android, game platform. And with Vision, they could easily become the largest VR gaming platform in the world, even though this might not be the immediate focus upon release — but iPhone didn't have any games on release either. Mentioning partnership with Unity in Vision announcement presentation is very significant. It is the most used game engine in the world (especially if you count by game installations) which dominates mobile market, and it has been developing VR/AR capabilities for many years now, even though it arguably doesn't have the same AAA graphics as Unreal.

nhggfu 3y ago

why does it look laggy and verging on unplayable, i wonder?

dagmx 3y ago
Because they’re running it at Ultra on the lowest end hardware configuration, with an x86_64 to arm64 translation, and a shader translation and a windows api wrapper. For comparison, the M1 was routinely benchmarked in NVIDIA 1050 TI to 1070 territory depending on the benchmark. This is only a few fps behind native.

tantalor 3y ago

I guess the video looks okay but the Twitter embed video quality is dog shit. Maybe post the video somewhere like YouTube instead that supports higher quality.

Animats 3y ago

Direct-X 12 support, but not Vulkan?

nazka 3y ago

I truly wonder if Microsoft didn’t help with this port. Looking at the speed and quality of this port. It seems that Apple and Microsoft are working closer than ever. Maybe some execs of Microsoft asked for to be in this demo.

gigel82 3y ago
Insert Bike Fall Meme here :)

bogwog 3y ago

Look at all the time and effort spent to port Wine when all they had to do to win over developers was officially support OpenGL and Vulkan.

GravityLabs 3y ago

This is my daily driver device and Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best video games I've ever played, so this has me very excited. Would love to take a break from code to play a few minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the same device I daily drive...

sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago

Oh, cool! You can use a tool to make a computer game barely run on an overpriced computer? I will never, ever understand the appeal of Apple products.

jacooper 3y ago

Have people here not tried Proton and DXVK? This is not impressive at all

yieldcrv 3y ago

nice proof of concept about the highest settings, gamers only care about 60fps minimum so should probably find/post a tweet showing those settings then gamers will move the goalpost to cost of the machine, but thats okay

CostcoFanboy 3y ago

95% lift by CodeWeavers, but Apple is the one to thank. Lmao.

justinclift 3y ago

13 FPS, so not really "playable" at Ultra settings for that resolution. That being said, that it works at all is pretty amazing. :)

culopatin 3y ago
I wonder what it plays like at more modest settings
- justinclift 3y ago
  Yeah, it could probably be made playable. :)