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by mattgreenrocks
587 days ago
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Wow, had no idea this worked as well as it does. I remember the initial hype when this showed up but didn't follow along. Looks like I don't have to regard my Steam library as entirely gone. Steam Deck-level performance is quite fine, I mainly just want to replay the older FromSoft games and my favorite indies every now and then. |
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First and foremost, it's just worth checking if your game has a native port: https://store.steampowered.com/macos People might be surprised what's already available.
With Wine syscall and Rosetta x86 code translation, issues do pop up from time to time though, like games that have cutscenes that are encoded as Windows Media Player specific formats, or any other media codecs which aren't immediately available since it's not like games advertise those technology requirements anywhere and you may encounter video stuttering or artifacts since the hardware is obviously dramatically different than what the game developers were originally developing against and there's things happening in the background that an x86 Windows system never does. This isn't stuff that's overly Mac specific since it usually impacts Linux equally but it's a hurdle to jump that you don't have to deal with in native Windows. Like I said, playing Windows games outside of Windows is just a different set of pain points and you have to be able to tolerate it. Some people think it's worth it and some people would rather have higher game availability and keep the pain of Windows. Kudos to Valve with creating a linux based handheld and the Wine and Proton projects for improving this situation dramatically though.
Besides the Game Porting Toolkit (which was originally intended for game developers to create native application bundles that could be put on the App Store), there's also Crossover for Mac that does their own work towards resolving a lot of these issues and they have a compatibility list you can view on their site: https://www.codeweavers.com/ and alternatively, some games run acceptably inside virtualization if you're willing to still deal with Windows in a sandboxed way. Parallels is able to run many games with better compatibility since you're actually running Windows, though last I checked DX12 was a problem.