Hacker News Reader

Comment by als0 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I haven't tried many newer games, but the performance of all the pre-2022 games I play is excellent.

This guy has done a lot of testing on the latest CrossOver builds with GPTK on M1/M2/M3 devices: https://www.youtube.com/@Andytizer/videos

But what does "excellent" mean? Can you play any game with modern graphics at native resolution with at least 60 fps? That's barely happening on gaming laptops so I am kind of wondering if maybe the reason this sort of vague praise never mentions any particular games, settings, frames per second, etc. You know, the useful information.

I am writing this on a light Linux laptop with a Ryzen 6800H APU. It is somewhat capable for a laptop this small and light but it is no match for my gaming PC. Kind of doubt my m2 max is going to offer better gaming experience.

What vague praise? I mentioned I mostly play older games. Your M2 Max won't get anywhere near gaming PC performance, but now that DX12 is mostly working some recent games should work with lower graphics settings. The Youtube channel I linked tests a lot of different games on various machines, and it doesn't take much time to just test it out yourself.

These games should be playable on an M2 Max: Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo IV, Control, Dead Space, Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man Remastered, FF7 Remake, Shadow Warrior 3

Recently I've been playing AOE2 DE, it's upscaled to native resolution and runs at 120fps with highest graphics.

I tried one really old game, that you could run on cheapest Windows PC without any problems. On my M1 Pro I had about 6 FPS.

It did take me a while to fiddle with everything to get it right. I play most of the games through Steam on Porting Kit, which for the most part "just works" if you're playing a supported game.

If you're doing it through Whiskey there can be a bit of trial and error getting the right DLLs loaded.

>> shame that Apple doesn't partner with Valve on this, although not surprising in the least. reply

Please no. The Linux community, small and nerdy, is relatively self-supporting. The vastly larger apple community want things to just work. That's what they are paying for when they buy apple products. The deluge of support requests might push valve away from the entire concept.

Why? Everyone wants things to "just work", but nobody besides Windows and Xbox users can run native DirectX. Seeing as MacOS and Linux users have to cope with this individually, it makes sense that they would share a lot of the underlying work. They already do, courtesy of Codeweavers.

If Apple offered hardware-level Vulkan support on their systems, gaming on Mac would "just work" like it does on Steam Deck, for the most part. Even if they didn't, Apple could still improve on Game Porting Toolkit by open-sourcing their fork, accepting contributions or (gasp) upstreaming their work. Valve does every one of those things, and their gaming experience on Linux is console-quality because of it. Apple doesn't necessarily have to work with Valve, but it sure would reduce the amount of redundant work both parties are responsible for.

Yes, apple can do lots of things to help the process. In any partnership, it would be Valve would be fighting the uphill battle to keep customers happy. Linux users will generally try for hour/days to get a game working before submitting a support request. Apple users aren't that nerdy. Linux users want things to just work. Apple users expect it.

I still don't understand the conflict of interest. Valve is closer to pushbutton game compatibility than Apple, their translation kits are both based on DXVK and they both use tons of Codeweavers code. In a lot of ways, they're retreading the same path with zero tangible benefit to the user.

Obviously Game Porting Toolkit is not meant to be a crutch, but it's clear there's demand for games to work on Apple hardware. As a user, why are you opposed to having more options alongside Apple's more restricted, curated offerings?

I don’t think apple wants us to play games with Wine and Game Porting Toolkit. Especially not games on Steam.

Apple wants developers to use it to port their games to macOS (using Metal) and distribute them on the App Store (only).

Sure, but I don't see why adding functionality would be a bad thing. There are thousands of games that will just never be ported away from 32-bit Windows. If Apple doesn't intend to keep those running forever, they should at least equip the community with the tools to fix it themselves.

It makes sense why Apple doesn't want it, but I'm surprised to see the community reject the idea too. The "set and forget" experience of the Steam Deck is fantastic, and entirely attainable with Apple's homogenized hardware pool.

Meh. I think Valve would definitely support Proton on Linux if Mac had Vulkan support on the GPU. High performance DX 9,10,11,12 translation to Vulkan is what made Proton possible. And no MoltenVK is not enough.

What games have you tried?

Games from over 20 years ago that work well with Wine on other platforms:

- Morrowind doesn't start after the launcher.

- Manhunt runs at 5 FPS. Five!

- Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey doesn't start

- Deus Ex is too slow to be playable

- Jet Set Radio doesn't start

- Half-Life Blue Shift works well

For Morrowind you should use OpenMW https://openmw.org/downloads/

The rule of thumb is generally that for Windows games pre-2008ish, Parallels is a better choice, since they tend to rely on weird corners of Windows compatibility and 32-bit performance in Wine is still not always great. DXVK + MoltenVK is generally the best choice for anything post-2000s, pre-DX11, and GPT/D3DM is generally the best choice for anything DX11/DX12.

Are any of those DirectX 12? The GPTK only supports DirectX 12, anything else won't get much of an advantage.

When was the last time you tried? It's gotten a lot better since I first tried it (probably like 15 years ago)

All of those today, about an hour ago. As I said, they work fine with Wine on Linux but not with Wine/Whisky on the Mac.

That’s my experience too. It looks like some modern games that are 64 bit and use DX12 and thus game porting toolkit‘s dx2metal work quite okay, but 32 bit DirectX<11 games run particularly awfully.

And I’m running what the community has dubbed the best way, crossover with cxpatcher.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com