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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them.

On the other hand, GeForce Now is what let me get rid of Windows and my gaming desktop altogether. For the supported games, it's a truly superb experience, launching into max graphics with a single click. I don't have to install or upgrade anything (patches or drivers) or worry about hardware obsolescence. It's insanely powerful (RTX 4080 equivalent), has no local heat or noise, and barely sips battery life (compute is all in the cloud).

Completely changed the way I game. And this is as someone who grew up on BBS door games and configuring sound blaster and vmem in config.sys. GFN is so so nice and much better than dealing the nightmare that is modern Windows. And a lot easier than managing Proton and WINE too. Nothing beats it for sheer ease of use when I just want to game for a few hours without headaches.

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> As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them.

We experimented with macOS support prior to launching Proton, but Apple had spent the previous decade repeatedly kicking Valve and game developers in the nuts[1], which meant no one on the team had any particular passion for it. Between Apple's hostility & unreliability, and the small market share, we decided it wasn't a good use of time, so dropped the idea before launch.

You may know this, but CodeWeavers integrates most improvements to Proton into upstream Wine and also into their CrossOver product. So if you use CrossOver, you actually are getting many of the same improvements that are going into Proton.

[1] Garbage OpenGL support; killing 32-bit support, which killed a huge chunk of users' Steam libraries; no Vulkan support.

100% this is Apple's fault. They never took gaming seriously. I'd hoped that would change with the M series integrated GPUs, but that hasn't been the case lately, with only a tiny number of titles launching with Apple Silicon support. That's on Apple, not anybody else.

For what it's worth, I did buy and occasionally use Crossover (thank you!), but only when the game isn't supported on GeForce Now.

My M2 Max, even at its best (as in Baldur's Gate 3 running native Apple Silicon code), is still no match for a 4080... not even close. Crossover works well for simple indie games, but AAA games often have more demanding requirements. The extraordinary performance of DLSS (Nvidia's AI upsampling and frame interpolation algorithm) alone makes non-Nvidia GPUs less viable these days. And that's just the performance side.

Then, Crossover's UX is a whole other issue. Crossover's Steam takes forever to launch every time (I'm not really sure why this is; never bothered to really look into it). It's never clear to me which proper combination of D3DMetal/DXVK/Esync/Msync to use (I still don't even know what the "sync modes" mean). Some games only work with a certain version of Apple's GPT (for others: Game Porting Toolkit, not AI) manually installed, or requiring the bleeding-edge preview version of Crossover, etc. The idea of user-managed "bottles" and disks is a lot more complicated than GFN's model of individually vendor-managed sandboxed/containerized games, preconfigured to work right the first time and every time. That's the kind of arcade/console like experience I want these days since it's zero fuss. (But it often does preclude mod and trainer support, as a tradeoff.)

Overall... I'm grateful Crossover exists. It's easier to use than Whisky, and Codeweavers contributes a lot of code back upstream. Again, thank you. There are some games I wouldn't be able to play at all otherwise.

But most of the time these days, as a working man and not a teenager anymore, I have limited time to spend on gaming. GFN lets me just click a button and play without fuss, vs all the tinkering required of virtualized & emulated games. It's the difference between "wait a few seconds and I can play at max graphics" and "if I tinker with this for a couple hours, it might eventually launch and maybe I can squeeze 30 fps out of it on low-medium".

Steve Jobs reportedly[1] never really liked computer games, and didn't really care about them being on Macintosh. It wouldn't be surprising if this streak still exists in Apple culture, even though iOS became quite the gaming powerhouse despite Apple's lack of interest in the genre.

1: https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/john-carmack-steve-jobs-hat...

Maybe it's because I'm in a shitty location (Spain), but these gaming streaming services never felt good enough for me. I've tried a bunch of them (including GeForce Now and more recently, the PlayStation streaming thingy) and they all introduce too much latency + now the quality of the screen suffer from the same type of quality degradation as YouTube, which just looks fucking horrible. I'd rather play on lowest quality settings and lowest resolution than having to view that sort of compromise on image quality.

> And a lot easier than managing Proton and WINE too

I can understand wanting to avoid having to manage Wine, prefixes and all that jazz. But Steam + Proton is literally zero management. You install Steam, start it, install the game and hit "Play", the only Proton thing you notice is that it download and installs it before the actual game runs. Otherwise there is nothing you have to do as a user.

> shitty location (Spain)

Eh? As in, proximity to the streaming server?

Otherwise, fiber is prolific in Spain (in major cities at least, to the best of my knowledge). I get 500Mbps down here in Valencia (for just €15 too!)

> Eh? As in, proximity to the streaming server?

Exactly! I've had symmetric fiber in countless of apartments in Barcelona, with latency to mainstream sites down to something like 2ms at the lowest. But the game companies who do streaming don't seem to cater to Spain (or Barcelona) at all since the latency always been horrible regardless.

Have you tried any of them and seen if the latency is shit or not?

I haven't tried any of them, sorry.

Yeah, it's unfortunately only viable if you're near one of their data centers – and even then, some of their international third-party partners have crappy graphics cards and networks. In the US, though, it is an amazing experience, more like streaming in 4K (which it can do) with minimal lag. Even first-person shooters are perfectly playable, as long as you're not trying to go pro. No compression artifacts or visible degradation at all for me.

> But Steam + Proton is literally zero management.

Absolutely. I had a Steam Deck for a few weeks* and that experience was amazing. Valve did a really really good job there. Unfortunately that's just not how it is in the Mac world :( We have Whisky and Crossover, which are much much harder to use.

(* The Steam Deck is a great piece of kit. I eventually sold it only because I already had a Logitech GCloud, https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-gaming/cloud-..., which does the same thing except streamed from GFN and with a bigger/better display than the Deck.)

Amazon has started pushing their version, which I think is called Luna. I haven't tried it, but if they run an instance out of EU-South-2 in Spain, you might get better results.

Looked through their entire collection (https://luna.amazon.es/subscription/luna-plus/B085TRCCT6) and there seems to be one game I'd be willing to play, although I already own it locally. For 10 EUR/month, getting access to ~100 games where most of them are cheap IP cash-grabs, seems like a very Amazon approach to video games.

Stadia worked really well for me (midwest US), but the other services haven't been as reliable. Back on hardware for me. SteamDeck is really nice at least.

Heh, I'd give it a try, but I didn't even have time to try it out before it disappeared :)

I think it was around for a couple of years and I bought a ton of games on it. When Google sunk it they refunded my purchases, which was nice.

What's funny is I think if Google had said upfront "if we kill this service we'll refund all your games/hardware purchases" they'd have got a lot more traction.

You should give Geforce Now a try. It's dramatically better than Stadia. (I used both.)

GFN has much more powerful graphics (because they're Nvidia), supports 4k, 10-bit color, HDR, ultrawide, etc. Nvidia Reflex helps with latency. You can use your own Steam or Epic or Microsoft library and play with those players. You don't have to rebuy the games like you did in Stadia.

And Nvidia actually cares about it and is constantly improving it. Google abandoned Stadia pretty much right after launch because they're Google.

Yeah, I had GeForce now when it first came out and the Steam library sharing was dope. It just seemed to lag and drop frames a lot where Stadia was seamless.

I'm sure GeForce Now has improved a lot since then. I should give it another shot. I miss gaming in bed from my iPad.

Obviously it’s not initially remotely a plug and play solution but if you install Steam under Game Porting Toolkit you actually can take advantage of Proton and its improvements much of the time, and after the initial setup there’s very little further tinkering needed.

There is a lot of inter-game variability, unfortunately. (I'm a regular tester and contributor to the Crossover compatibility database: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility)

Some games, especially simple indie titles, run flawlessly. Others won't launch at all. Most mainstream AAA titles launch but with severe lag and/or graphical anomalies. It's a far cry from native, Proton on Linux, or GeForce Now. I wouldn't recommend it except as a last resort.

The problem with cloud gaming is that isn't available in all countries and it depends a lot on your ISP, so the experience may vary for different people.

Apple ended up doing their own version of Proton that you can use:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752164/apple-mac-gaming-...

Been using it for a while but it's been hit and miss, unfortunately. It's not a plug and play solution and doesn't have a pre-game compatibility database that Proton has Crossover had their own, but many games still don't work or play acceptably.

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