[SXX]

Apple could easily make gaming on Mac feasible by contributing to Proton, Wine, DXVK and officially supporting Vulkan at least through translation layer.

Or just partner with Valve to do exactly this for their platform.

Instead they choose to build another proprietary solution nobody gonna use and that will die as soon as they lose interest.

[zer0zzz]

I agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?

[SXX]

  > landing patches to make Wine better on Mac

AFAIK they dont contribute back to Wine. There some chance they quietly pay to CodeWeavers, but likely this wouldnt be kept secret.

  > I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan

It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms.

Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share.

Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts.

At the same time Valve released Steam Deck 4 years ago and by now nearly all Windows games are playable on Linux.

[zer0zzz]

> It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms.

How does this actually help Apple customers have a better experience in some unique way that live translation to Metal does not? Runtime GPU compilers already do plenty of runtime translation; having worked on several I could be convinced having a simpler interop layer would make things smoother but your argument comes across as ideological more than about shipping product.

> Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share.

Hardly anyone one uses their proprietary solution (Metal) directly. But that doesn't mean Vulkan is going to be some panacea of gamer/game-dev adoption.

> Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts.

While I agree its not that widely used for porting actual games, I think a lot more people probably do use D3DMetal to run Windows games on mac.

[bigyabai]

> How does this actually help Apple customers have a better experience in some unique way that live translation to Metal does not?

By decoupling the support for Windows games from Apple's whimsical downstream release cycle, obviously. Proton would build perfectly fine on macOS with proper DXVK support, enabling the "same day" support patches that the Steam Deck and Steam Frame enjoy. There would be no need to wait to play games like Arc Raiders because all you'd need to do is update your Proton runtime. Users would get have more flexible options for playing new games that Apple doesn't support with GPTK point releases.

> But that doesn't mean Vulkan is going to be some panacea of gamer/game-dev adoption.

They can perfectly well support both APIs. If Apple wants to have a mobile-first rendering API on their desktop, fine, but it shouldn't hamstring the other features of a computer like eGPU support or basic third-party drivers like Mesa. There's no reason it would.

[zer0zzz]

I’m not entirely sure what apple’s interest in any of this is. Would it get them any additional customers? What portion of their customers would be significantly more happy with games being somewhat more optimized a few months sooner? I just don’t see the value add here.

I’m not sure the community needs that much support from apple either. Lot of projects have figured out how to targete AIR directly by now.

[inatreecrown2]

I wish this were/is true, that Apple supports Wine development. But as far as we know, a year from now Apple will end Rosetta 2 support in macOS 28, and with it the ability to run Wine.

[SXX]

AFAIK Crossover is now able to run without Rosetta:

https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2026/6/11/whats-in...

Most likely Wine will work soon too. Only some 32-bit apps will break.

[ls612]

My theory is that Apple chooses to make gaming a second class experience on Mac because they don't want the Mac brand to be associated with the main demographics that play AAA games.

[lern_too_spel]

The Mac brand is already associated with Apple zealots, and they don't seem to care about that, so that's obviously not it. It's more that Jobs personally didn't care for games. He put an end to Pippin and Game Sprockets as soon as he returned. Now there's still some inertia against gaming, but if they can figure out how to make money off gamers, they'll be more than happy to.

[dinfinity]

A strange thing to comment on an article specifically about a toolkit produced by Apple to improve gaming on Macs.

Needlessly dismissive of a large swath of people too.

[ls612]

I’m not claiming to like the choice (I don’t) merely that it likely is the real motive for Apple.

[rubyn00bie]

Granted this is just my personal spend, but Apple has lost out on something like $12k of hardware sales from me over the past six years because they don’t support gaming. I switched to Linux in 2020 because it meant I could have a proper development environment AND play games. Before I was split between Windows and Mac, having to buy two machines— one for gaming and one for development.

If Apple didn’t treat gaming like a red-headed step child I’d have never made the switch. Now, it’s an incredibly steep uphill battle to win me back to MacOS. Linux slaps and NVidia has way better performance (though I wish I could get more than 32GB of VRAM without forking over $10k).

So yeah, while they might not like stereotypical gamer[1] types, I’m sure they’d like their money. For me the only Apple device I buy is a new iPhone once every 4-5 years. My lifetime value (to Apple) is essentially roughly 25%-33% of what it would have been if they supported gaming.

[1] I think more people play games now than ever before. While 20 years ago gaming might have been niche, we have multiple generations at this point who have been playing video games their entire lives. Realistically, it’s only boomers who haven’t played video games (or had access to them) the majority of their lives.