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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

My greatest wish is that Apple would put a fraction of their billions into porting Proton to Metal and by extension the M-series CPUs.

That would instantly make the M1-series machines the greatest gaming machines in the world. All that power with an emulation layer in between, allowing every macOS user to play any game made only for Windows.

People have literally stopped developing their Linux-native game versions because the Proton-Windows -emulation is so much better.

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> That would instantly make the M1-series machines the greatest gaming machines in the world.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. A laptop running a binary through two separate emulation layers is not going to provide a better experience than any dedicated gaming PC.

Bang for buck it just might.

Not if you're comparing it to a fully tricked out gaming PC.

Proton (WINE) Is Not an Emulator. And Rosetta is a semi-dynamic translation layer. Both have pretty impressive performance on their own, with many Rosetta-translated programs running faster than a high-spec Intel machine. So there's no reason this combination couldn't exist or provide a good experience.

Rosetta is built into the hardware of the M-series chips somehow, they're specifically made to be really good at emulating Intel commands, which makes them crazy fast.

The Apple-specific instructions in M-series have been generally shown to have less impact on overall performance than initially expected: https://twitter.com/never_released/status/153412764108259328...

Well TSO support is kind of important.

I feel like going through translation layer for graphics intensive things is not going to be a smooth as more display static programs.

Only cpu instructions have to be translated, graphics are "native" in the sense both the previous AMD and Intel GPU's used metal and openGL, just as the new integrated gpu's do.

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