This is super cool.
So, wait, does this mean that gaming is better on Linux, on a Mac?
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Wine is wonderful and with Valve's help it only got better.
But why would gaming on a mac be better? Maybe one day, but for now:
FTA: "While many games are playable, newer AAA titles don’t hit 60fps yet."
Right. It sounds like the Asahi devs have implemented APIs which aren’t available under stock MacOS.
Back when I was actively developing for Freespace, we had a Linux port that had a better framerate than Windows (the game’s original platform).
For instance, Alyssa mentions in this post that most emulated games will need at least 16 Gigs of RAM at minimum.
In addition, native ARM games on MacOS don't have the additional overhead of emulating a different CPU architecture and Graphics API.
However, that doesn't take away from this emulated support being an amazing achievement.
I think the answer might be yes, because it's possible to play so many more titles!
Apple and Wine provide the tools, and apps like Whisky make them easy to use.
> Essentially, this app combines multiple translation layers into a single translation tool. It uses Wine, a translation layer that allows Windows apps and games to run on POSIX-based operating systems, like macOS and Linux. It also uses Rosetta and the Game Porting Toolkit, which are two official Apple tools that allow x86 programs to run on Apple Silicon and serve as a framework for porting Windows games to macOS, respectively.
Normally, this sort of process would require users to manually port games to Mac. But by combining Wine, Rosetta, and the Game Porting Toolkit, this can all happen automatically.
https://www.xda-developers.com/hands-on-whisky-macos-gaming/
However, as aleays, running games under emulation has a performance cost.
I don't believe that's true. According to ProtonDB, 80% of the top-1000 most-played games on Steam are confirmed working on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
I haven't seen any source documenting nearly similar success rates with Mac but I also haven't seriously tried gaming on Apple Silicon.
https://docs.getwhisky.app/game-support/index.html
I had assumed the lack of Vulkan on macOS was a major issue. Apparently not!
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That includes raytracing support and heterogeneous paging support which are two things Alyssa calls out explicitly herself. Not to mention the VM overhead.
That’s not to say Alyssa’s work is not very impressive. It is. But GPTk is still ahead.
That’s not even including the other aspects of Mac support that Asahi still needs to get to. Again, very impressive work, but the answer to your question is No.
PC games use DirectX as their graphics API, so you need something that can translate from DirectX to the native graphics API your OS is running.
On MacOS you'd be translating from DirectX to Metal and Apple provides the emulation software (D3DMetal) as part of the Game Porting Toolkit.
On a Steam Deck, Proton uses Vulkan on Linux as the native graphics API, so in that case you are translating from DirectX to Vulkan.
> DXVK (which translates Direct3D 8, 9, 10 and 11 calls to Vulkan on the fly), vkd3d-proton (which translates Direct3D 12 to Vulkan)
DS2 comes in both DX9 and DX11 flavours. The latter should work better with d3dmetal and is more comparable to what proton is doing.
You’re lucky to get 60fps playing a fairly undemanding game on MacOS, even on hardware that is otherwise a dream.
For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 is barely playable on my M3 MacBook Pro at well below native resolution with all settings turned down. It’s a brilliant game but hardly cutting edge graphically.
That's because the RAM is shared with the GPU and most of these games would require a GPU with at least 2-4GB on top of the normal system requirement to have at least 8GB. So, 8GB of RAM would be cutting it close on a mac since part of that would have to be sacrificed for the GPU.
My strong conviction is that From is pretty much technically inept when it comes to Windows ports so I just play their titles on console...
An emulated title that is in itself a not so great port will have trouble ofc...
as for how well fromsoft games run on windows you might have been right 12 years ago when dark souls 1 came out initially. it was a mess at the time, but souls games have been running just fine on windows(and linux for that matter) for years. it's only on macos that it is a mess. this has nothing to do with fromsoft and everything to do with macos.
You are forgetting the increasing number of titles targeting Vulkan directly.
They are running emulated games in their own separate virtual machine, because Intel games expect a 4k page size and the OS is running with a 16k page size.
Virtual Machines require their own chunk if memory overhead, so the resource usage can't help being higher than a native MacOS game's would be.
When it came out initially for windows I had already done two playthroughs so just did ... not ... care. I just read it's a crap port in the news.
> souls games have been running just fine on windows(and linux for that matter) for years
Maybe. For like 4 years I ran my PCs without a dedicated video card because crypto and chip crisis. The whole PS5 with an extra controller cost less than an equivalent PC video card at the time :)
[I do have a video card now, but only because someone paid me to write neural network code.]