Apple basically just released Proton for Mac

[jesus123]

Summary

The game porting kit Apple released turns out to have a publicly available launcher for windows games through a simple terminal command and working pretty much like proton does on Linux. This is based on Crossover Code and is published as open source from Apple.

 

Quotes

Quote

The environment of the Game Porting Toolkit translates your game’s Intel instructions and its use of Windows APIs for keyboard, mouse, and controller input; for audio playback; for networking and file system use; and of course, for graphics. All modern graphics features, such as GPU-driven pipelines and SIMD operations, and even older features, such as tessellation and geometry shaders, are translated.. 

 

My thoughts

 There is not a lot of information out there but in the video you see how easy it actually is. 
installing it works super easy with homebrew in simple steps:

https://gist.github.com/Frityet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae858e

There are little amounts of people that have tried that yet since it requires the developer Mac OS beta but depending on how well this works this could be absolutely huge.

people are saying the source code reveals it should be directx9-12 compatible.

 

some guy made cyberpunk run on a m1 MacBook Air (15fps on ultra tho, but was impossible to launch before)

 

here some other discussion about it:

https://mastodon.social/@film_girl/110498328122064691

https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/142tomx/apples_game_porting_toolkit_seems_to_have_a/

 

Sources

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/?time=237

 

https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple

[Obioban]

I suspect this is going to be a very big deal.

[SorryBella]

4 hours ago, jesus123 said:

The environment of the Game Porting Toolkit translates your game’s Intel instructions and its use of Windows APIs for keyboard, mouse, and controller input; for audio playback; for networking and file system use; and of course, for graphics. All modern graphics features, such as GPU-driven pipelines and SIMD operations, and even older features, such as tessellation and geometry shaders, are translated.. 

If it is this literal, would it also affect standard windows version of games too in a good way?

[Forbidden Wafer]

17 minutes ago, SorryClaire said:

If it is this literal, would it also affect standard windows version of games too in a good way?

Nope. 

[Brooksie359]

2 hours ago, Obioban said:

I suspect this is going to be a very big deal.

It sounds like this is going to be niche and not something that comes standard to macos so I doubt this will be that big if a deal until they have a mainstream implementation. If you expect a normal person on an Apple computer to go through the steps required to get this to work then you are crazy. This seems more like something some tech savvy people using apple computers will end up using. 

[hishnash]

The use case of this is as apple suggest a tool that you can use to convince your PM that the game will run well enough on Mac to be worth doing the port.

The rest of the porting toolkit is what will make tings easer for parting, the big one being the aiblyt to have a shard HLSL shader base that compiles directly to Metal IR so you do not need to maintain 2 seperate sets of shaders code.  Then the task of adapting your c++ DX code to on macOS call apples Metal apis is not that hard and will be rather fast for devs.  The step of optimisation once they have done this will take some time as they learn about the HW differences and thus the differnt approaches to having optimal code. 

[jesus123]

2 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

It sounds like this is going to be niche and not something that comes standard to macos so I doubt this will be that big if a deal until they have a mainstream implementation. If you expect a normal person on an Apple computer to go through the steps required to get this to work then you are crazy. This seems more like something some tech savvy people using apple computers will end up using. 

Don’t think so I already seen someone mention some kind of launcher that got build around this. So effectively you’ll not need to know what you’re doing. Also entering 2 commands in a terminal actually is something more Mac users know in percentage than probably windows users…

I mean basically you could argue the same it’s crazy that casual users on steam deck are supposed to run their  games through proton. Effectively this is a non issue. It’s certainly possible to streamline the process in a user friendly ui 

 

edit: here you go

https://github.com/IsaacMarovitz/Whisky

[jesus123]

 

 

 

 

 

Thats in less than a day more tripple A games we seen running on Mac than we had before. 

I’m pretty sure this is huge for Gaming on Mac already and people have barely started to test it out.

[jesus123]

51 minutes ago, hishnash said:

The use case of this is as apple suggest a tool that you can use to convince your PM that the game will run well enough on Mac to be worth doing the port.
 

That’s true, Apple didn’t release it stating this is for customers. But as far I could see the whole code is open source and therefore consumer application of this would be possible.

 

its still Apple so maybe they will find a way to screw this up, but if things stay the way they are i have zero doubts Some launcher will get established with this running at its core (I already have seen one)

https://github.com/IsaacMarovitz/Whisky

[hishnash]

30 minutes ago, jesus123 said:

But as far I could see the whole code is open source and therefore consumer application of this would be possible.

The DXMetal lib is not, this is a bundle you pull from apple. And the terms on it are rater strict. 
 

31 minutes ago, jesus123 said:

i have zero doubts Some launcher will get established with this running at its core (I already have seen one)

https://github.com/IsaacMarovitz/Whisky

Yer side project things like this for sure will be fine and apple does not mind, but if valve were to bundle this in steam that would be a breach of the terms, if they made steam pull it form apple on users request then it comes down to the term `test/evaluate` and the term`your games` what that means.  Is it only a violation of the license form apple if you use a pirated game or would a judge consider it a violation if you use a game you purchased a copy of and thus own but you did not make. .. apples terms are normally much more rock solid so I expect this is intent inlay here to make it legaly grey but ok for you to play around yourself but grey enough that someone else cant wrap this up and sell it. 

[jesus123]

19 minutes ago, hishnash said:

The DXMetal lib is not, this is a bundle you pull from apple. And the terms on it are rater strict. 
 

Yer side project things like this for sure will be fine and apple does not mind, but if valve were to bundle this in steam that would be a breach of the terms, if they made steam pull it form apple on users request then it comes down to the term `test/evaluate` and the term`your games` what that means.  Is it only a violation of the license form apple if you use a pirated game or would a judge consider it a violation if you use a game you purchased a copy of and thus own but you did not make. .. apples terms are normally much more rock solid so I expect this is intent inlay here to make it legaly grey but ok for you to play around yourself but grey enough that someone else cant wrap this up and sell it. 

I see. What does that say about apples underlying motivation there?

 

Is this their way to still push developers to rather port their games to the Mac instead of just optimizing them for the translation layer like we see in Linux?

[RedRound2]

Well, and practically overnight, gaming on a mac is suddenly a thing.

 

On a more serious note, I'd like to see the performance of the M series mac compared to a dedicated GPU. I don't actually think it will be that great, but it should sort of make apple focus on the GPU aspect of their chips for future iterations

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, jesus123 said:

s this their way to still push developers to rather port their games to the Mac instead of just optimizing them for the translation layer like we see in Linux?

Yes absolutly they do not want a load of games to ship that run at 1/4 to 1/2 the perf they could get, not only is this bad as a game but it drags down the HW as people will compare the perf of the HW on these games to other laptops and extrapolate that out to other applications (that might be native and well supported). 

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, RedRound2 said:

On a more serious note, I'd like to see the performance of the M series mac compared to a dedicated GPU. I don't actually think it will be that great, but it should sort of make apple focus on the GPU aspect of their chips for future iterations

Its not as bad as you might think, it is a LOT better than any other integrated GPU, after all the M2 Max has a LOT of die area dedicated to GPU, even the entry level M1 has more than 2x the die area for the GPU than the cpu.  These are GPUs with integrated cpus, also form a mem bandwidth perspective. 

[jesus123]

1 hour ago, RedRound2 said:

Well, and practically overnight, gaming on a mac is suddenly a thing.

 

On a more serious note, I'd like to see the performance of the M series mac compared to a dedicated GPU. I don't actually think it will be that great, but it should sort of make apple focus on the GPU aspect of their chips for future iterations

We already know that tough.

The m1 GPU is basically on paar with a 1050ti. 

The m2 is similar to the 1060/1650.

m1 pro etc is basically twice the cores of the m1 and so on.

[Tan3l6]

Only way I'd ever swap to any Mac It'd have to have a native support for all games DX/OGL

Far fetched pipe-dream (Like Andy Fufresne) though.

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, jesus123 said:

Don’t think so I already seen someone mention some kind of launcher that got build around this. So effectively you’ll not need to know what you’re doing. Also entering 2 commands in a terminal actually is something more Mac users know in percentage than probably windows users…

I mean basically you could argue the same it’s crazy that casual users on steam deck are supposed to run their  games through proton. Effectively this is a non issue. It’s certainly possible to streamline the process in a user friendly ui 

 

edit: here you go

https://github.com/IsaacMarovitz/Whisky

Again I think you are overestimating the average apple user. Unless it's very easy to use and mainstream I don't see this taking off. The idea that your average Mac user is going to download a program from github to run this code is simply overly optimistic. Sure more tech savvy people might end up using this but I don't think this will be big outside if the tech enthusiasts space. 

[hishnash]

10 minutes ago, jesus123 said:

The m1 GPU is basically on paar with a 1050ti. 

The m2 is similar to the 1060/1650.

So these numbers are alittel bit +- it depends on what you are doing a LOT. In theory a very well optimised title on Apples GPUs can skip a lot of wasted work that would happen on a 1050ti, the HW obscured fragment culling means for opaic geometry you only every call fragment shaders for the visible fragments so 0 overdraw!  And other features with AA sampling etc are quite a bit more advanced.  So in a very well optimised title an M2 might well be more like a 1080 or higher. In many games there is a LOT of overdraw that is wasted work. 

But to take proper advantage of this you need to do a lot of optimisation for Apples GPUs. 

[AlTech]

2 minutes ago, hishnash said:

So these numbers are alittel bit +- it depends on what you are doing a LOT. In theory a very well optimised title on Apples GPUs can skip a lot of wasted work that would happen on a 1050ti, the HW obscured fragment culling means for opaic geometry you only every call fragment shaders for the visible fragments so 0 overdraw!  And other features with AA sampling etc are quite a bit more advanced.  So in a very well optimised title an M2 might well be more like a 1080 or higher. In many games there is a LOT of overdraw that is wasted work. 

That's not how computer graphics and game optimisation works. Also to get anywhere near that level of optimisation out of AS for gaming would effectively require not optimising the game for AMD or Nvidia at all.

2 minutes ago, hishnash said:

But to take proper advantage of this you need to do a lot of optimisation for Apples GPUs. 

Yes, at the exclusion of every other platform or every other GPU on that platform.

 

Then Apple can say on their website that M3 or whatever runs Up To 20x faster than an RX 580. (Just an example)

[AlTech]

9 hours ago, Obioban said:

I suspect this is going to be a very big deal.

I highly doubt it.

 

4 hours ago, jesus123 said:

I see. What does that say about apples underlying motivation there?

That Apple wants developers to maintain a seperate Mac codebase for games.

4 hours ago, jesus123 said:

Is this their way to still push developers to rather port their games to the Mac instead of just optimizing them for the translation layer like we see in Linux?

Well yes considering the limitations of this translation layer.

 

They want games to be ported to macOS fully and are using this to assist developers in porting it.

 

This isn't a Proton for Mac as the title of the thread suggests.

[jesus123]

48 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Again I think you are overestimating the average apple user. Unless it's very easy to use and mainstream I don't see this taking off. The idea that your average Mac user is going to download a program from github to run this code is simply overly optimistic. Sure more tech savvy people might end up using this but I don't think this will be big outside if the tech enthusiasts space. 

I think you are just equaling Mac users with iPhone users.

there are many cases where you need to follow simple Instructions and just copy pasting code into the the terminal. It’s nothing seriously new. The terminal in Mac is more Present for the average user than it is on windows. That’s not saying every Mac user knows it of course but I doubt the average Mac User is a bigger noob in terms of terminal than the average windows user. 
 

 And again you can implement all of this steps in a nice GUI and you don’t need to ever touch the terminal again. So what’s your point exactly?

[jesus123]

4 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

That's not how computer graphics and game optimisation works. Also to get anywhere near that level of optimisation out of AS for gaming would effectively require not optimising the game for AMD or Nvidia at all.

Yes, at the exclusion of every other platform or every other GPU on that platform.

 

Then Apple can say on their website that M3 or whatever runs Up To 20x faster than an RX 580. (Just an example)

Can you further explain why you would need to effectively optimize games for Apple silicon only and can’t do it for all platforms? It’s not im much into game development but as of now most issues relied with games not supporting metal due to it missing key features in regards how it handles shaders.

 
 you’re aware tho your example has the sole purpose to take a dump on Apple and doesn’t make your credibility seem super high in terms of objectively giving your opinion.

[jesus123]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

I highly doubt it.

 

That Apple wants developers to maintain a seperate Mac codebase for games.

Well yes considering the limitations of this translation layer.

 

They want games to be ported to macOS fully and are using this to assist developers in porting it.

 

This isn't a Proton for Mac as the title of the thread suggests.

Why would Apple want a separate codebase?  The reason would be to have optimized code and not only have a “good enough” version of that game…

 

Apple is obviously pretty aware it will be used like proton tho. Also this is mainly based on crossover code which is pretty much proton for Mac. Both are based on Wine at the end and the actual difference between proton and crossover was that crossover worked worse due to lacking features in metal which is a non issue on Linux that does support Vulcan directly. Proton as it seems right now is better in terms of performance but this porting tool is more or less 1 day old. I have a hard time believing you’re  actually objectively seeing potential in it and against it for legit reasons the way you’re arguing so far…

 

Do you have reasons why you doubt it will have an impact. It’s the first time we see tripple a directx12 titles running in Mac ever. This is pretty meaningful already if you ask me. No one says the Mac is near to what the PC can offer for gaming but it’s surely a major step to a development similar to Linux…

proton wasn’t  amazing across the board on day one either…

A knowledging major progress is different to acting like it will take over the industry

[Fasterthannothing]

7 hours ago, jesus123 said:

 

 

 

 

 

Thats in less than a day more tripple A games we seen running on Mac than we had before. 

I’m pretty sure this is huge for Gaming on Mac already and people have barely started to test it out.

honestly that's amazing 

[Obioban]