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Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorting by playercount, which seems to be corroberated here: https://steamcharts.com/top

I am counting Proton games because they very explicitly are supported by sufficient Vulkan coverage. In case you weren't paying attention that's kinda the only reason anyone cares about Apple Silicon getting Vulkan 1.3 coverage in the first place.

> when it's easy to get a more extensive list that is around ~250 games total.

You're right, when we push it out to 1000 titles it gets closer to 80% playable: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

> Of which, a massive percentage are based on engines that have Metal support as well.

...yeah, you keep telling yourself that. One day, they'll definitely flip the switch on MacOS support. Certainly.

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Okay, so you're counting non-native games when the discussion is AGAIN clearly about native games. If we're talking about translation layers, then it's irrelevant because Whisky/Crossover can run them as well.

This is just you being completely disingenuous now and purposefully avoiding the actual point of the discussion.

I think it's absolutely fair to count games that are able to run in Linux with Proton via DXVK + Vulcan. Since it's well established and relatively popular thanks to Valve's efforts with the Steam Deck and Proton.

Given those efforts, if Apple/Mac had support for Vulkan, Valve would probably make it all just as available on Mac as they do on Linux for Proton.

Even with Vulkan support on macOS it would be harder for Valve to make many games accessible as they do on Linux – unlike Linux, macOS does not support running 32-bit binaries anymore.

You'd be correct a few years ago, but not anymore. WOW64 mode is pretty good nowadays.

Well - they might. I don't think Valve would hate being the gaming gateway for Mac as well as for PC, but they have great Linux support because of the Steam Deck.

If I'm not mistaken, supporting MacOS with Proton was the implicit plan before Apple disabled 32-bit support in Catalina. Several people seem to have gotten early builds to compile on Mac with usable performance: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344

Dxvk is notoriously bad on moltenvk. I have tried and have completely given up running it.

This was never about native games. It would be very convenient if Proton didn't exist and native games were the only playable option, but in many cases Proton titles run better than native Windows. It's an equivalent, if not superior, experience.

It would be a lot more disingenuous if the Steam Deck didn't exist and Linux gaming was a farce. But... it's not. And the only thing stopping Apple from enjoying the same spoils is a little bit of humility.

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