[jsheard]

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.

[GeekyBear]

> Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan.

You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.

On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.

[jsheard]

Valve could implement a separate Metal backend for Proton, what I'm saying is they probably wouldn't want to spend their resources on that.

[derefr]

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.

[jsheard]

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.

[Andrex]

Exactly.

Compare Steam Machine (2014) to Steam Machine (2026). The difference this time around is Proton support, and you can pretty easily see the hype on the internet for the new version, even after the original version was mocked relentlessly in some circles for having "no games."

[Cloudef]

Target apple and in 5 years your binary wont work anymore anyways

[nasretdinov]

Well, some games like Civ V still manage to work! But they actually had to port it to 64-bit, otherwise it'd have the fate of all other 32-bit macOS games unfortunately...

[happymellon]

> compatibility layers have overhead

Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again.

cough /final cut/ cough

[tick_tock_tick]

Apple could but Apple would rather die they allow something to work cross platform.

[davely]

I think they are also absolutely addicted to cruddy pay to win mobile games and they don’t want to give up that sweet drip feed of IAP that they get a 30% cut of… which is substantial.

For funsies, try searching App Store apps and find a way to filter out results for apps with IAP. Nope!

(Source: me, who spent time at a mobile gaming company as we figured out how to continuously optimize our funnels so that some rich dudes in Qatar could continue to spend $40K a month on useless cosmetics.)

[thirdsun]

I think that filter is called Apple Arcade but of course it's not free.

[mikkupikku]

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.

[hbn]

Every few years at WWDC they'll make some mention of some upcoming new gaming features. A couple years ago they showcased that their new iPhones could run the latest Resident Evil game. Hell, they brought out Kojima one year to announce a Death Stranding port for Mac.

The efforts are usually short-lived and mostly fruitless, but I wouldn't say they're "grossed out" by gaming nerds.

[jakogut]

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.

A VR headset. That doesn't play games.

[thefz]

Nope because they could not gouge developes with pricy tools, steep registration fees and cutthroat slice of their sales on Apple's app market.

[pjmlp]

Apple already has their own way, and they rather have studios rewrite the games.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

[swiftcoder]

The porting toolkit is more or less Apple's version of Proton:

"evaluate your unmodified Windows executable on Apple silicon using the evaluation environment for Windows games"

A bunch of games just ship the Windows executable and some version of that translation layer in their MacOS App bundle

[pjmlp]

That is step one, see WWDC sessions on the matter.

[Andrex]

Apple and gaming is like oil and water, it'll never happen.

They'll spend billions on a handful of (late) AAA ports for macOS every 4-5 years, and then go radio silent again.

[vessenes]

Potato Potatoh. I think Apple is the largest game platform in the world, or ate least iOS is.

[ahartmetz]

It isn't, Android is the largest mobile gaming platform. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/mobile-g...

[samtheprogram]

That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.

I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.

The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.

[jsheard]

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.

[GeekyBear]

Proton is a downstream fork of Wine, and upstream Wine already directly supports playing Windows games on Mac using D3DMetal.

You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.

[samtheprogram]

That doesn't change the fact that D3DMetal is closed-source. Wine just links to it.

There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.

[pdpi]

Right now, the user experience with Crossover is that you have to manage the whole thing of installing Windows Steam in a Wine bottle, then installing games within that second Steam installation, then dealing with the fact that Steam doesn't seem to like having two instances running on the same computer (my native Steam loses connectivity every time I start the Crossover instance).

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.

[GeekyBear]

> Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.

Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation.

Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.

[alessandroberna]

They could also use MoltenVK

[jakogut]

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.

[yAak]

https://www.lunarg.com/lunarg-at-xdc-2025-kosmickrisp-overvi...

[miohtama]

Wouldn't it be Apple's benefit to get more gaming on MacOS? Their goals might align with Steam.

Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it.

[WhyNotHugo]

Valve seems to break free form depending on someone else’s walled garden.

Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden.

Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software.

[evilduck]

Hard to swallow.

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.

[andriesm]

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.

[BruceEel]

and plus one here! I don't know, I like my mac workflow but irritation and aggravation have crept in more frequently of late. Last week I was told a binary that clang++ had just produced from my own code could not be run because Apple couldn't check whether it was safe.. And what to make of power users complaining bitterly about Tahoe & liquid glass etc? I'm hanging on to Ventura for now.

[poulpy123]

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

[sgentle]

DXMT has been advancing very quickly: https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt

[pdpi]

True, forgot about that. That said, Apple does have D3DMetal. A man can dream that they eventually opensource that.

[easyThrowaway]

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.