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Comment by inasio | Hacker News Reader

All, or at least most of Valve's games used to run natively on Mac, and now they don't (even on Intel Macs)

Is this a problem Valve should invest in fixing because it's an issues caused by them, or a problem Apple created for not caring about backwards compatibility on MacOS the same way Microsoft does on Windows?

If Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility on their platform, why should Valve or other developers be burdened with the added cost, especially on a platform with small market share that won't drive many sales?

Amen. I didn't understand why Apple is one of the only companies that gets to break backward compatibility, and escape all blame when stuff breaks. It always seems to be put on the software developer to update with whatever Apple's new requirements are, even when it's older software (or ancient)!

Running native or emulated doesn’t really matter if the performance is good enough.

Better translation layers are what made the Steam Deck possible.

Good enough doesn't mean optimal, though. Every layer adds a performance penalty and that's how we end up in situations where we have layers and layers of abstraction eventually making all programs slow even on ever increasing hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law

In fact, Windows gamers are using DXVK to reduce overhead.

One needs to realise graphics APIs have historically not been terribly efficient.

How do you know that those graphics APIs have not been efficient?

Benchmarks.

There was a reason Mantle/Vulkan came to be.

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