4 ms·

> Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphic

> Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API. On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.

jsheard 11mo ago
Valve could implement a separate Metal backend for Proton, what I'm saying is they probably wouldn't want to spend their resources on that.
- samtheprogram 11mo ago
  That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better. I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games. The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jsheard 11mo ago
    That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.
    - GeekyBear 11mo ago
      Proton is a downstream fork of Wine, and upstream Wine already directly supports playing Windows games on Mac using D3DMetal. You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.
      - samtheprogram 11mo ago
        That doesn't change the fact that D3DMetal is closed-source. Wine just links to it. There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.
      - pdpi 11mo ago
        Right now, the user experience with Crossover is that you have to manage the whole thing of installing Windows Steam in a Wine bottle, then installing games within that second Steam installation, then dealing with the fact that Steam doesn't seem to like having two instances running on the same computer (my native Steam loses connectivity every time I start the Crossover instance). Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
        gpderetta 11mo ago
        As a comparison, before proton, you could run steam with wine under linux. Wine directx implementation was sufficient to make a quite a few games work just fine, but the experience was atrocious. You either had to install a new instance of steam per game or install everything under one bottle which didn't work well as you had to tweak the install per grame. Personally I used it just for one or two of games that I really wanted to play and could actually run outsisde of steam after installation. In comparison the proton experience is seamless.
  - GeekyBear 11mo ago
    > Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better. Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation. Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.
- derefr 11mo ago
  Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
  - jsheard 11mo ago
    Apple could but they're not interested in non-native games, they want native ports or nothing. As I discussed a few posts over, Apple went to the trouble of developing a DirectX compatibility layer, but then told game developers they're not allowed to use it for anything besides evaluating whether their game would run well enough on Mac hardware. If they go ahead with a port then Apple still expects them to do it all the hard way. It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
    - happymellon 11mo ago
      > compatibility layers have overhead Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again. cough /final cut/ cough
    - Cloudef 11mo ago
      Target apple and in 5 years your binary wont work anymore anyways
      - nasretdinov 11mo ago
        Well, some games like Civ V still manage to work! But they actually had to port it to 64-bit, otherwise it'd have the fate of all other 32-bit macOS games unfortunately...
    - Andrex 11mo ago
      Exactly. Compare Steam Machine (2014) to Steam Machine (2026). The difference this time around is Proton support, and you can pretty easily see the hype on the internet for the new version, even after the original version was mocked relentlessly in some circles for having "no games."
- alessandroberna 11mo ago
  They could also use MoltenVK
jakogut 11mo ago
As far as I understand, there's actually an intermediate driver on macOS that implements Vulkan on top of Metal, similar to how Proton implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan. The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.

jsheard 11mo ago

Valve could implement a separate Metal backend for Proton, what I'm saying is they probably wouldn't want to spend their resources on that.

samtheprogram 11mo ago
That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better. I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games. The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- jsheard 11mo ago
  That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.
  - GeekyBear 11mo ago
    Proton is a downstream fork of Wine, and upstream Wine already directly supports playing Windows games on Mac using D3DMetal. You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.
    - samtheprogram 11mo ago
      That doesn't change the fact that D3DMetal is closed-source. Wine just links to it. There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.
    - pdpi 11mo ago
      Right now, the user experience with Crossover is that you have to manage the whole thing of installing Windows Steam in a Wine bottle, then installing games within that second Steam installation, then dealing with the fact that Steam doesn't seem to like having two instances running on the same computer (my native Steam loses connectivity every time I start the Crossover instance). Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
      - gpderetta 11mo ago
        As a comparison, before proton, you could run steam with wine under linux. Wine directx implementation was sufficient to make a quite a few games work just fine, but the experience was atrocious. You either had to install a new instance of steam per game or install everything under one bottle which didn't work well as you had to tweak the install per grame. Personally I used it just for one or two of games that I really wanted to play and could actually run outsisde of steam after installation. In comparison the proton experience is seamless.
- GeekyBear 11mo ago
  > Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better. Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation. Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.
derefr 11mo ago
Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
- jsheard 11mo ago
  Apple could but they're not interested in non-native games, they want native ports or nothing. As I discussed a few posts over, Apple went to the trouble of developing a DirectX compatibility layer, but then told game developers they're not allowed to use it for anything besides evaluating whether their game would run well enough on Mac hardware. If they go ahead with a port then Apple still expects them to do it all the hard way. It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
  - happymellon 11mo ago
    > compatibility layers have overhead Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again. cough /final cut/ cough
  - Cloudef 11mo ago
    Target apple and in 5 years your binary wont work anymore anyways
    - nasretdinov 11mo ago
      Well, some games like Civ V still manage to work! But they actually had to port it to 64-bit, otherwise it'd have the fate of all other 32-bit macOS games unfortunately...
  - Andrex 11mo ago
    Exactly. Compare Steam Machine (2014) to Steam Machine (2026). The difference this time around is Proton support, and you can pretty easily see the hype on the internet for the new version, even after the original version was mocked relentlessly in some circles for having "no games."
alessandroberna 11mo ago
They could also use MoltenVK

jakogut 11mo ago

As far as I understand, there's actually an intermediate driver on macOS that implements Vulkan on top of Metal, similar to how Proton implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan. The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.