I believe this work is a continuation of the work the asahi linux people did to get games working on M-series macs. It seems Alyssa Rosenzweig works at valve as a contractor. Super cool work. Some seriously talented folks.
What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.
On her website it says she is working on GPU drivers there - I wouldn't be surprised if that's something she greatly enjoys and Intel gave her then opportunity to work on official, production shipping drivers instead of reverse engineered third party drivers.
Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real.
I wouldn't have thought so 5-10 years ago, but with Microsoft offering Windows on ARM the is really no OS that specifically targets x86 (Legacy MS products will keep it alive if the emulation isn't perfect).
The thing is, x86 dominance on servers,etc has been tied to what developers use as work machines, if everyone is on ARM machines they'll probably be more inclined to use that on servers as well.
I imagine there's also some challenging work that would be fun to dig into. Being the person who can clean up Intel's problems would be quite a reputation to have.
There’s a real limit on what level of problem one engineer can fix, regardless of how strong they are. Carmack at Meta is an example of this, but there are many. Woz couldn’t fix Apple’s issues, etc.
A company sufficiently scaled can largely only be fixed by the CEO, and often not even then.
I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.
Would it shock you to hear that famous engineers with their own personal brand power have different opportunities and motivations than many/most engineers?
Their point is even made stronger by your comment. Engineers of this type don't experience megacorps like regular engineers. They usually have a non-standard setup and more leeway and less bureaucracy overhead. Which means brand isn't the biggest thing, the specific projects and end user impact are.
This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:
> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.
> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.
Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.
Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
Apple could but they're not interested in non-native games, they want native ports or nothing. As I discussed a few posts over, Apple went to the trouble of developing a DirectX compatibility layer, but then told game developers they're not allowed to use it for anything besides evaluating whether their game would run well enough on Mac hardware. If they go ahead with a port then Apple still expects them to do it all the hard way.
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.
Apple thinks PC games are for gross nerds and would rather not sully their fashion image by associating with gamer any more than is absolutely necessary. So no, Apple won't be doing that.
It would make sense, but Apple has large amounts of disdain for people having fun with their products. This evidenced by the large amounts of engineering they've put into very large, capable, and efficient GPUs, only to squander them on rendering web pages and liquid glass.
They released Apple Vision Pro with no ability to play popular PC games on it.
That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.
As far as I understand, there's actually an intermediate driver on macOS that implements Vulkan on top of Metal, similar to how Proton implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan.
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.
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.
Same! I main macos, love the hardware, but I keep a very close eye on Linux (asahi, omarchy etc) in case Apple gets any more toxic, and I am forced to jump ship to something else, and that something else won't be windoze.
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.
Apple is big enough to not need gaming and their philosophy is to have the most control possible on their ecosystem and to be the most closed possible. For them it makes no sense to encourage steam to be big on mac (except as a way to jumpstart their own system before closing it). And it is especially true now that steam is making machines, so is a direct competitor
I mean, theoretically they could backport the D3DMetal wine driver from the Game Porting Toolkit. Also I remember there was some early preliminary work done on stock wine a few years ago.
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.
I believe that was part of the original plan for Proton, but with the success of the Steam Deck that got shelved and it moved to a focus purely on Linux.
I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment.
CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory.
Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux.
The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.
Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.
I mentioned elsewhere — Right now, using Wine/Crossover is a hassle. 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.
But honestly at this point I’m destined to buy a Steam Machine despite having a hefty Mac that could do gaming if only it were possible. Valve have been amazing about open computing and Apple are basically the enemy at this point.
It makes me wonder about what using steam machine for all computing might look like, as the new home of open computing and gaming.