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Comment by aaron-santos | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, our macOS and Linux native clients depend on our DX9 implementation for their OpenGL renderer to function.

I'm not a gamedev and just have some hobby xp in DX and OpenGL, but I don't begin to understand why an OpenGL renderer would in any way depend on DX. Is this just code for "we have such few Mac and Linux users that it isn't worth our time to support OpenGL"?

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They wrote the game targeting DX9, and then wrote a custom shim to translate from DX9 to OpenGL calls. Now they are transitioning to DX11 to get some newer features, and have evaluated the amount of work that it would take to either update that shim layer for DX11 -> OpenGL/Vulcan for Linux, or DX11 -> Metal for MacOS (remember, Apple is depreciating OpenGL on their platforms).

If linux and MacOS combine account for less than 0.3 percent of their revenues... then even as a MacOS guy I have to see their logic... there is little chance of recouping the heavy lift that they would have.

They probably use some outdated translation layer that converts DX9 calls to OpenGL ones so that they didn't have to maintain two renderers or use a higher level 3rd-party engine that abstracts over those calls. Newer games using Steam's Proton, like Sekiro, look and perform nearly equivalently to their Windows DX11 counterparts. I know Proton isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but it's an example off the top of my head. I guess CS:GO is another more apt one.

I would imagine the game is using dx9 and for linux/macos it would run through a dx9 -> opengl translation layer.

AFAIK: The way DX9 works for Windows software running under Wine, is that wine has a layer that intercepts all DX9 calls and retranslates them into OpenGL. There is no equivalent for DX11.

Wine has supported DX11 for over 2 years at this point[1]. However, how is that relevant? Did the Mac and Linux versions use Wine?

[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/wine-3-0-released-direct...

No clue. I was making an educated guess. I was stuck with DX9 for a while because I wanted some stuff to run under wine. I switched to opengl nearly... 6 years ago now? Didn't realize it had been that long.

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