Whisky: Wine supercharged with the power of Apple's game porting toolkit
getwhisky.app
getwhisky.app
Thank you, Isaac. The details matter.
Electron apps are only easier if you don’t care about good UI, just “cheap cross platform”. It’s even more obnoxious when many of these “apps” can be loaded in safari and then interact properly with the rest of the system.
Electron apps are lowest common denominator apps where the primary goal is cheap rather than good. There is no user facing metric by which an electron app is superior to a native one: they’re slower, bigger, and use vastly more memory, and result in drastically worse battery life.
I wish Apple would hire a team to properly maintain this, the way Valve has done with Proton and Steam Deck Verified.
In the meantime, I find that GeForce Now (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/) provides a much more seamless, one-click-and-play experience. It works every time and doesn't break on every update, etc. Its primary downside (aside from a very reasonable monthly subscription fee) is that it has a relatively small game library, with only a subset of Steam/Epic/Xbox title available to play. But of the games it supports, it provides an overwhelmingly better experience than Whisky, GPT, or even native Apple Silicon gaming. The 4080 is dramatically more powerful than even the highest end Mac, and running it in the cloud means no local noise or heat, and much much better battery life. For anyone interested in actually gaming on a Mac without headaches, with good graphics and a good framerate, I'd strongly recommend GFN and just ignoring the ports or emulation layers. It's just a much better experience.
Valve cooperated with Codeweavers, the makers of Crossover, to build Proton. And afaik Apple „works“ with Codeweavers. Well at least they don‘t get in the way to incorporate GPTK into Crossover. Apple changed the licence of GPTK so that Codeweavers can include GPTK.
Part of the nuance here is that although both can use GPT underneath, there's still a lot of config that needs to happen beforehand (e.g. different "sync" modes that impact not just visual fidelity, but whether the game will even launch at all). Does CrossOver take care of all that for you (with predefined pre-game profiles, perhaps) or do you still have to manually configure every title?
It certainly does. It has presets for most mainstream games and it uses the latest version of Wine.
The author of Whisky, in a move that can't be praised enough, has decided to not update further the version of CrossOver on which Whisky relies. This is so that Whisky does not become a free clone of CrossOver, given that CodeWeavers are the ones developing Wine. So, I'd say it is worth using CrossOver! They also have a free trial, so I'd give it a try and compare it with Whisky for a specific game, and see what runs better!
edit: found a guide on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Gui...
mind blown that we can get this type of performance knowing how many hops are involved to get this to work (Rosetta2, DirectX -> Metal etc).
I hope these type of things give AAA studios the motivation to check out Apple Game Porting Toolkit.
- Using AMD FSR 2 to upscale a 1280x720 render target to 1080p, and all graphic presets set to low they benchmarked ~42 FPS on M1 Pro and 47 FPS on M1 Max.
Around the same ish ballpark as with a GTX 700 series dedicated GPU, released 10 years ago. And around twice the performance of other integrated graphics of other modern CPUs.
Edit: I saw your comment in parent thread.
Oh, and if someone can lipread, the audio mutes at 02:06:55 :-)
Needs people to contribute to get to the point of running Safari, but the foundation is there.
“…we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications.”
But not yet.
Everyone who wants to do video editing on a Linux box. Or, in other words, everyone who doesn't want to buy and maintain a $$$$ apple machine just for occasional video editing. The same people who don't want to keep windows boxes running just because one random client needs them to use some random Windows only software
I use the Photoshop part of my Adobe subscription mostly on a Mac, but I boot my desktop over to Windows if I need to use Premiere and After Effects because applying to those problems a GPU that weighs as much as my Mac does counts for something.
What’s wrong with running Adobe Premiere through Wine?
Oh and there’s way too few people who would want to video edit with Linux but Mac software. I mean there’s probably a hundred people on the planet, no joke.
If you boot the same machine in Win11, it's silent playing most games, zero stutter, just smooth.
macOS going through the same means in 2043 they might be enjoying the extra heat dissipation.
To be clear, I'm really thankful this exists. It's has been super helpful not having to reboot into Windows so often but, in my experience, even with a lot of tweaking things aren't better than on Windows.
Maybe I'm a fan of games that hit all the issues in this page https://wiki.winehq.org/Performance
[1]: http://etoileos.com/
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20231006225735/https://www.oldver...
Windows games tend to be isolated all in one executables.
While there certainly is a handful of exclusive software for the Mac, I don't see anything that would generate broader interest in this.
Personally I've had very little luck getting much of anything to work, though.
Do you have some kind of insider knowledge?
Or are you just claiming things to be definitively true that are, in fact, merely speculation?
I'd say they have an incentive to not drop Rosetta until they reach a critical nexus of support from the studios... enough that it will cause the laggards to quickly add support once it's taken away. Maybe that will be there in a couple years, but likely it will take a bit longer.
1. The architecture they're migrating away from is the dominant architecture in the market (both now and for the past few decades), meaning that rather than simply losing support for older MacOS software, they'd be losing access to easy virtualization of everything Windows and Linux can do.
2. The architecture they're migrating to is their own, 100% in their control, meaning that they can maintain hardware-level support for this translation layer without needing to convince any other company to put that effort in on each subsequent chip generation.
Now, does this mean they're guaranteed to maintain Rosetta 2 forever? No, of course not. I don't know what Apple's going to do any more than you or viktorcode do.
But it does mean that seeing this transition as being exactly a mirror of the past 2 architecture transitions they did is dangerous, at best.
I hope GPTK is just Apples first foray into gaming, they could release a trimmed-down version (less ports, no ethernet, no speaker) of a Mac Mini with a gaming focus and compete with PS5/Xbox on the price. But it needs better software UX for gaming just like Proton did for Linux.
Check the Xiaomi RedmiBook Pros. You'd be surprised.
All these Chinese manufacturers are on AliExpress. There are many offers for Beelink SER7 with AMD 7840 chips.
They have Ryzen APUs and additionally GPUs (the 2022 model had Nvidia, this year's has AMD).
I have the 2022 15" Pro version and its a beast.
The benefit from this happening would be twofold: it gives a much wider spread of users access to hardware that can deal well with moderate graphical workloads and it provides a common minimum spec for game devs to keep in mind that’s actually powerful enough to deliver a decent experience (as compared to now, where iGPUs are near writeoffs for anything but esports titles).
It requires more silicon which will increase power consumption and require more heat dissipation... same issues with discrete GPUs. Where would the additional performance come from?
On the software side of things, iGPU drivers tend to better optimized for efficiency compared to discrete GPU drivers, where that’s almost an afterthought and in some cases broken (like the laptop I had where the sleep state in the drivers for its Nvidia card was broken for years).
[0] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Gui...
On the other hand, the Steam launcher itself somehow runs faster via Whisky than the native Mac version.
Plus it goes with the whole gaming port thing
It's the purchase that is so often regulated.
(And you're right, in many places the latter limit is lower than 18. For example in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Belgium, non-spirits like wine and beer can be bought from 16.)
The two (drinking age vs. alcohol buying age) often get confused, but consumption limits per se are actually pretty rare. (Assuming it takes place in private – laws regarding drinking in public are somewhat more common.)
[1] https://scotchwhisky.com/whiskypedia/1888/royal-lochnagar/
Cider should be the name.
wine => brandy