You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.
On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.
I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.
The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.
There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.
Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
In comparison the proton experience is seamless.
Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation.
Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.
It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again.
cough /final cut/ cough
Compare Steam Machine (2014) to Steam Machine (2026). The difference this time around is Proton support, and you can pretty easily see the hype on the internet for the new version, even after the original version was mocked relentlessly in some circles for having "no games."
For funsies, try searching App Store apps and find a way to filter out results for apps with IAP. Nope!
(Source: me, who spent time at a mobile gaming company as we figured out how to continuously optimize our funnels so that some rich dudes in Qatar could continue to spend $40K a month on useless cosmetics.)
"evaluate your unmodified Windows executable on Apple silicon using the evaluation environment for Windows games"
A bunch of games just ship the Windows executable and some version of that translation layer in their MacOS App bundle
They'll spend billions on a handful of (late) AAA ports for macOS every 4-5 years, and then go radio silent again.
The efforts are usually short-lived and mostly fruitless, but I wouldn't say they're "grossed out" by gaming nerds.
They released Apple Vision Pro with no ability to play popular PC games on it.
A VR headset. That doesn't play games.
The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.
Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it.
Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden.
Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software.
Every day I sit down at a Mac for work and proceed to launch VS Code, Zed, Outlook, DBeaver, Excel, Teams, LogSeq, Syncthing, Chrome, Firefox, LM Studio and Docker. I prefer MacOS but basically all of my application workflow exists for Windows verbatim and if using browser versions of the MS apps, on Linux too.
The last straw with MacOS was when my US bank cards expired, I could no longer update apps I already paid for, I could no longer install apps I already paid for. Everything was held hostage, could not install FREE apps via the appstore on macos or on ipad.
That day my eyes opened to what Apple has become.
You simply cannot trust Apple with your computing future. They're a fashion company now.
Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times.