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> As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them. We experimented wit

> As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them. We experimented with macOS support prior to launching Proton, but Apple had spent the previous decade repeatedly kicking Valve and game developers in the nuts[1], which meant no one on the team had any particular passion for it. Between Apple's hostility & unreliability, and the small market share, we decided it wasn't a good use of time, so dropped the idea before launch. You may know this, but CodeWeavers integrates most improvements to Proton into upstream Wine and also into their CrossOver product. So if you use CrossOver, you actually are getting many of the same improvements that are going into Proton. [1] Garbage OpenGL support; killing 32-bit support, which killed a huge chunk of users' Steam libraries; no Vulkan support.

solardev 2y ago
100% this is Apple's fault. They never took gaming seriously. I'd hoped that would change with the M series integrated GPUs, but that hasn't been the case lately, with only a tiny number of titles launching with Apple Silicon support. That's on Apple, not anybody else. For what it's worth, I did buy and occasionally use Crossover (thank you!), but only when the game isn't supported on GeForce Now. My M2 Max, even at its best (as in Baldur's Gate 3 running native Apple Silicon code), is still no match for a 4080... not even close. Crossover works well for simple indie games, but AAA games often have more demanding requirements. The extraordinary performance of DLSS (Nvidia's AI upsampling and frame interpolation algorithm) alone makes non-Nvidia GPUs less viable these days. And that's just the performance side. Then, Crossover's UX is a whole other issue. Crossover's Steam takes forever to launch every time (I'm not really sure why this is; never bothered to really look into it). It's never clear to me which proper combination of D3DMetal/DXVK/Esync/Msync to use (I still don't even know what the "sync modes" mean). Some games only work with a certain version of Apple's GPT (for others: Game Porting Toolkit, not AI) manually installed, or requiring the bleeding-edge preview version of Crossover, etc. The idea of user-managed "bottles" and disks is a lot more complicated than GFN's model of individually vendor-managed sandboxed/containerized games, preconfigured to work right the first time and every time. That's the kind of arcade/console like experience I want these days since it's zero fuss. (But it often does preclude mod and trainer support, as a tradeoff.) Overall... I'm grateful Crossover exists. It's easier to use than Whisky, and Codeweavers contributes a lot of code back upstream. Again, thank you. There are some games I wouldn't be able to play at all otherwise. But most of the time these days, as a working man and not a teenager anymore, I have limited time to spend on gaming. GFN lets me just click a button and play without fuss, vs all the tinkering required of virtualized & emulated games. It's the difference between "wait a few seconds and I can play at max graphics" and "if I tinker with this for a couple hours, it might eventually launch and maybe I can squeeze 30 fps out of it on low-medium".
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Steve Jobs reportedly[1] never really liked computer games, and didn't really care about them being on Macintosh. It wouldn't be surprising if this streak still exists in Apple culture, even though iOS became quite the gaming powerhouse despite Apple's lack of interest in the genre. 1: https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/john-carmack-steve-jobs-hates-games/1/ https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/john-carmack-steve-jobs-hat...

solardev 2y ago

100% this is Apple's fault. They never took gaming seriously. I'd hoped that would change with the M series integrated GPUs, but that hasn't been the case lately, with only a tiny number of titles launching with Apple Silicon support. That's on Apple, not anybody else. For what it's worth, I did buy and occasionally use Crossover (thank you!), but only when the game isn't supported on GeForce Now. My M2 Max, even at its best (as in Baldur's Gate 3 running native Apple Silicon code), is still no match for a 4080... not even close. Crossover works well for simple indie games, but AAA games often have more demanding requirements. The extraordinary performance of DLSS (Nvidia's AI upsampling and frame interpolation algorithm) alone makes non-Nvidia GPUs less viable these days. And that's just the performance side. Then, Crossover's UX is a whole other issue. Crossover's Steam takes forever to launch every time (I'm not really sure why this is; never bothered to really look into it). It's never clear to me which proper combination of D3DMetal/DXVK/Esync/Msync to use (I still don't even know what the "sync modes" mean). Some games only work with a certain version of Apple's GPT (for others: Game Porting Toolkit, not AI) manually installed, or requiring the bleeding-edge preview version of Crossover, etc. The idea of user-managed "bottles" and disks is a lot more complicated than GFN's model of individually vendor-managed sandboxed/containerized games, preconfigured to work right the first time and every time. That's the kind of arcade/console like experience I want these days since it's zero fuss. (But it often does preclude mod and trainer support, as a tradeoff.) Overall... I'm grateful Crossover exists. It's easier to use than Whisky, and Codeweavers contributes a lot of code back upstream. Again, thank you. There are some games I wouldn't be able to play at all otherwise. But most of the time these days, as a working man and not a teenager anymore, I have limited time to spend on gaming. GFN lets me just click a button and play without fuss, vs all the tinkering required of virtualized & emulated games. It's the difference between "wait a few seconds and I can play at max graphics" and "if I tinker with this for a couple hours, it might eventually launch and maybe I can squeeze 30 fps out of it on low-medium".

ryandrake 2y ago
Steve Jobs reportedly[1] never really liked computer games, and didn't really care about them being on Macintosh. It wouldn't be surprising if this streak still exists in Apple culture, even though iOS became quite the gaming powerhouse despite Apple's lack of interest in the genre. 1: https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/john-carmack-steve-jobs-hates-games/1/ https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/john-carmack-steve-jobs-hat...