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This isn't completely true. Crossover is allowed to ship the GPTK components for API translation (which they currently do as of 23.5) and games are allowed to e

by dagmx 2y ago

This isn't completely true. Crossover is allowed to ship the GPTK components for API translation (which they currently do as of 23.5) and games are allowed to embed Crossover elements like they did in the pre-Metal days with Cider etc. All this talk of DXVK doesn’t explain why games based on engines with native metal support aren’t on a Mac either.

talldayo 2y ago
Crossover is a paid product, and even then has pretty poor DX12 support compared to Proton. Up until a couple years ago it didn't work at all. Again; if Apple had just supported Vulkan alongside Metal like a normal non-paranoid company, their users wouldn't be caught in the middle of this. It's such a blatantly obvious solution with no user-facing downsides. It's shocking that anyone would defend the status-quo when it's so notoriously and obviously broken.
- dagmx 2y ago
  Your assertions aren’t backed by history though. Prior to metal and Vulkan, many games used Cider to target Mac despite having the same APi (at that point, an up to date OpenGL). And many of the current game devs do have Metal versions of their engines that they target towards iOS, yet don’t have a macOS version. The fact of the matter is that it comes down to market share. Macs have historically not had a large user base that also had capable GPUs. It’s not been worth supporting that tiny market share It’s the same on Linux. Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. This will inevitably go back to “well at least we could have used proton” but that’s also not true, and besides there’s GPTK. And then the argument becomes circular , because all evidence points to: devs just don’t care about Mac’s from a support perspective. You can make it easier, they still won’t come until the possible demographic size is larger. and even with DXVK, what about all the other platform specific differences? Vulkan wouldn't solve those either.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    I mean I owned a Mac back then, I remember pretty fondly that pre-Catalina MacOS was a fairly well-targeted platform. OpenGL was working for them; you could play first-person shooters, online games with fancy graphics, the kit and kaboodle. Things weren't perfect, but there was a lot of functional cross-platform software back when Apple commit to maintaining common APIs. You cannot deny that an entire ecosystem of software that was once cross-platform had to now choose sides, if they would support Metal or OpenGL. I watched it collapse with a single system update. > Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. My brother in Christ, the "reality of the state of gaming" is that Mac owners are buying Steam Decks just to access the games Apple tries to kneecap. Vulkan fixed it, and Valve commoditized Apple's compliment. I don't want things to be this way. I think Mac owners should have easy access to the games they want to play, but Apple insisted otherwise for so long and refused to ever admit that they were wasting their time. It's part of the reason I got rid of my Mac so I could daily-drive Linux; they were wrong, and other platforms were right.
    - dagmx 2y ago
      Go back and see how many of those games were running Cider though. The switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. The number of games that targeted OpenGL was ALSO shockingly low. This is something that OSS fans do not want to reconcile: Open source graphics APIs have LONG lost out to proprietary graphics APIs in gaming. OpenGL had a very small base in games, Vulkan is even smaller. and again, you went exactly back to where I knew you would and pre-empted it because it's the obvious playbook of answers. Vulkan didn't fix gaming on Linux. Proton did. And again, you ignore the key part of the sentence: NATIVE Linux has fewer *native* AAA games than macOS. Vulkan has not solved that. The SteamDeck is a product targeted at gamers that provided a new value proposition: AAA gaming on the go. Which further reinforces my point that API is irrelevant to the discussion, its about demographic. Apple has a strong gaming demographic on the mobile side (with metal no less). The steam deck didn't introduce new Vulkan/Proton capabilities. Why was Linux gaming stagnant before it? Doesn't that exactly reinforce that its the form factor proposition that made it skyrocket?
p_l 2y ago
While it might be true, I'd recommend to check if the licenses do, in fact, recurse this way. They might not.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by dagmx 2y ago

talldayo 2y ago

Crossover is a paid product, and even then has pretty poor DX12 support compared to Proton. Up until a couple years ago it didn't work at all. Again; if Apple had just supported Vulkan alongside Metal like a normal non-paranoid company, their users wouldn't be caught in the middle of this. It's such a blatantly obvious solution with no user-facing downsides. It's shocking that anyone would defend the status-quo when it's so notoriously and obviously broken.

dagmx 2y ago
Your assertions aren’t backed by history though. Prior to metal and Vulkan, many games used Cider to target Mac despite having the same APi (at that point, an up to date OpenGL). And many of the current game devs do have Metal versions of their engines that they target towards iOS, yet don’t have a macOS version. The fact of the matter is that it comes down to market share. Macs have historically not had a large user base that also had capable GPUs. It’s not been worth supporting that tiny market share It’s the same on Linux. Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. This will inevitably go back to “well at least we could have used proton” but that’s also not true, and besides there’s GPTK. And then the argument becomes circular , because all evidence points to: devs just don’t care about Mac’s from a support perspective. You can make it easier, they still won’t come until the possible demographic size is larger. and even with DXVK, what about all the other platform specific differences? Vulkan wouldn't solve those either.
- talldayo 2y ago
  I mean I owned a Mac back then, I remember pretty fondly that pre-Catalina MacOS was a fairly well-targeted platform. OpenGL was working for them; you could play first-person shooters, online games with fancy graphics, the kit and kaboodle. Things weren't perfect, but there was a lot of functional cross-platform software back when Apple commit to maintaining common APIs. You cannot deny that an entire ecosystem of software that was once cross-platform had to now choose sides, if they would support Metal or OpenGL. I watched it collapse with a single system update. > Why are there so few Linux native games? The argument that Vulkan would have solved this is completely incongruent with the reality of the state of gaming. My brother in Christ, the "reality of the state of gaming" is that Mac owners are buying Steam Decks just to access the games Apple tries to kneecap. Vulkan fixed it, and Valve commoditized Apple's compliment. I don't want things to be this way. I think Mac owners should have easy access to the games they want to play, but Apple insisted otherwise for so long and refused to ever admit that they were wasting their time. It's part of the reason I got rid of my Mac so I could daily-drive Linux; they were wrong, and other platforms were right.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Go back and see how many of those games were running Cider though. The switch to kill 32-bit games killed more games than the deprecation of OpenGL did. The number of games that targeted OpenGL was ALSO shockingly low. This is something that OSS fans do not want to reconcile: Open source graphics APIs have LONG lost out to proprietary graphics APIs in gaming. OpenGL had a very small base in games, Vulkan is even smaller. and again, you went exactly back to where I knew you would and pre-empted it because it's the obvious playbook of answers. Vulkan didn't fix gaming on Linux. Proton did. And again, you ignore the key part of the sentence: NATIVE Linux has fewer *native* AAA games than macOS. Vulkan has not solved that. The SteamDeck is a product targeted at gamers that provided a new value proposition: AAA gaming on the go. Which further reinforces my point that API is irrelevant to the discussion, its about demographic. Apple has a strong gaming demographic on the mobile side (with metal no less). The steam deck didn't introduce new Vulkan/Proton capabilities. Why was Linux gaming stagnant before it? Doesn't that exactly reinforce that its the form factor proposition that made it skyrocket?

p_l 2y ago

While it might be true, I'd recommend to check if the licenses do, in fact, recurse this way. They might not.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]