[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.