Valve seems to be working on tools to get Windows games running on Linux

Sniperfox47 · August 30, 2018

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

They are certainly pushing the Store, and they are doing it very hard, but I think the whole "they are no longer developing traditional Windows APIs" idea is a load of bollocks mainly pushed by UWP supporters.

Microsoft are still developing new win32 APIs and frameworks that can hook into win32 applications.

I totally agree with your overall point that Microsoft are ruining Windows and pushing people away from their platform. However, it seems like they are doing better than ever so I don't think they mind that they are displeasing a portion of their user base.

High level APIs certainly, but I was under the impression that they've largely stopped screwing with the low level API infrastructural/system level stuff though. Am I mistaken? I was under the impression that things like DirectSetup, the Win32 bindings for Direct2D, DirectWrite, and XAudio2, as well as most of the Win32 System Calls to NT have pretty much completely stabilized at this point as focus has shifted to UWP.

Higher level APIs like .NET really don't matter to a project like Wine/Proton since as they fix bugs in the underlying implementation they get better support for these high level APIs too.

I'm don't do a ton of development around Windows and typically use wrappers where I do so please correct me if my understanding is mistaken.

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Sadly, because of Apple's lack of support for OpenGL (soon? already done?) and Vulkan it will probably be significantly more complicated.

You're gonna need at least one more translation step to get it running on MacOS, and each translation can introduce performance and compatibility issues.

Apple really should start supporting Vulcan like everyone else. It would benefit everyone, including Apple (although I think their main focus is vendor-lock in, even if it's at the cost of compatibility with other programs).

Just to quickly comment on this, for most things the mapping of Vulkan to Metal via MoltenVK works pretty well. There's definitely a performance hit but it's not the end of the world. It was ~10% lower than Linux for Dota 2 but the performance was *WAY* better (40%) than doing it through OpenGL because of Apple's broken driver interface. You're looking at a little higher cost than straight Vulkan, but it's not totally broken or anything. The bigger performance worry is actually older games that rely on D3D 9 and lower.

MoltenVK meets pretty much all the needs of something like DXVK and most of the things it doesn't support are just because Metal itself doesn't support it but they can be worked around. If Steam Play Compatibility wants to be a viable solution for MacOS users, all they're really going to need is d3d9-to-11 so that they can get support for DX 7, 8 and 9 to add to 10, 11, 12, and Vulkan all through Metal with MoltenVK. You'd have d3d8-to-9 for D3D7/8 + d3d9-to-11 for D3D9 + DXVK for D3D10/11 + Vkd3d for D3D12 + Wines built in passthough for Vulkan + MoltenVK to make it all run on top of Metal drivers.

As far as OpenGL, Apple's depreciated OpenGL but they haven't announced actually dropping support.

ZacoAttaco · August 30, 2018

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Apple really should start supporting Vulcan like everyone else. It would benefit everyone, including Apple (although I think their main focus is vendor-lock in, even if it's at the cost of compatibility with other programs).

I don't think Apple really care about running games on their machines, unless it's native to their MacOS App Store. I feel like most regular users are happy with the small apps on the MacOS Store and not running AAA games through a service like Steam. Their hardware is usually not strong enough to run most Steam games I'd say.