[mikhael28]

Fantastic! A great proof of concept on Linux - lots of AAA gaming is already possible on Mac with Crossover and/or Parallels or VMWare Personal, which is free! While I have a Steam Deck, gaming on Mac works for me - I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller.

[dcchambers]

I know it's an extremely un-Apple-like thing to do, but I really wish Apple would team up with Valve to work on Proton, and bring full Proton support to MacOS.

[jsheard]

Bringing Proton to Mac would involve either Apple making amends with Khronos and supporting Vulkan, or Valve making the substantial effort to port Proton to Metal natively, or doing DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal translation with MoltenVK. None of those sound very likely or optimal to me.

Besides, the main reason Valve is investing so heavily in Linux and Proton is so their destiny isn't tied to someone else's platform. MacOS is just another someone else's platform like Windows is, with the same threat of getting rug-pulled by a first-party app store that spooked Gabe Newell[1] into investing in Linux in the first place.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18996377

[wtallis]

Apple already provides their Game Porting Toolkit which includes a D3D12 to Metal translation later for Wine, and it has been integrated into user-friendly Wine distributions like Crossover since last year. There's not much Proton has to offer over what's already available.

[dcchambers]

My understanding about the game porting toolkit is that it requires developers to specifically modify their game in order to make their game compatible.

The magic of Proton from a consumer point of view is that it just works for basically every game, sans those with Kernel-level anticheat stuff. This means thousands of old games that haven't been updated in years will work.any games that don't have active developers.

So Apples solution works for new games but isn't a practical option for compatibility for existing games.

[wtallis]

The stated intended purpose of the game porting toolkit is to enable developers to modify their games. But the software actually being shipped includes what is literally a Wine GPU backend, which is usable by (and already used and bundled by) consumer-facing Wine applications like Crossover. If you go to Codeweavers, download any Crossover for Mac from the past year (Sep. 27, 2023 according to their release notes), you're getting a tool that includes the D3D to Metal layer from Apple's Game Porting Toolkit.

[dcchambers]

Huh, TIL, thanks!

[fl0id]

There is things like whisky app which makes it a more general thing like proton

[whimsicalism]

crossover experience does not require manual modification by developer

[dcchambers]

TIL about Crossover. Thanks!

[duskwuff]

I wouldn't hold my breath. Valve is still bitter about Apple deprecating i386 support back in 2019.

[zaptrem]

Don’t forget Apple’s GamePortingToolkit based on Crossover/Wine and the open source client for it Whisky. I think it supports most games Linux Proton does now.

[cherryteastain]

You can hook up a monitor, mouse and keyboard to your Steam Deck to be fair.

[WithinReason]

BG3 is the only RPG I would play on a controller, it's very well done. You can also connect a keyboard and monitor to the Steam Deck, BG3 runs at 1080p high locked to 30FPS

[opan]

>While I have a Steam Deck, gaming on Mac works for me - I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller.

Personally 99% of my Steam Deck usage is with it docked. I do mostly use a controller, but also have it hooked to the same USB switch as my PC so I can hit a button to move my keyboard and mouse over.

Baldur's Gate 3 is the first game I ever ran on my Deck that did not run very well, though. Most stuff I've played runs at 60fps at my external monitor's 1920x1200 resolution. That in addition to not liking the gameplay on BG3 much made me not continue with the game, though I may revisit it someday.

[nottorp]

> I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller

I think you picked as an example one of the games that actually has a native Mac version?

Or is it a well hidden wine package? I've played it start to finish on Macs only and it looked too smooth to be emulation to me.

[jack_pp]

truth is macs have such a small market share for gaming that it ain't worth the effort