Whisky is no longer actively maintained

Does something like Whisky work in the new macOS Apple Silicon world? I assume its quite a bit slower to simulate Windows while at the same time translating x86 to Apple Silicon. I ask because this would be a justified break from this project, it's kind of a nightmare setup, you're better off just buying a $300 Windows laptop at Walmart or something.

Don't see why Wine would be slower than any other x86 application ran in emulation.

It runs incredibly well, I ran GTA5 on my old Macbook Pro M1 with it and got a respectable 60FPS on max settings. The apple GPTK is really very impressive.

Yes, CrossOver (which is mentioned in the article) works on Apple Silicon.

I never _not_ used Whisky on an Apple Silicon device. Recently played Control on my Mac mini M2 Pro with it.

It's not. It's very fast, especially for gaming. Playing POE 2 with GPT2 or a recent wine version at max setting on 60+ FPS on those days. On a M3 MAX.

Whisky was a front-end for Wine and related libraries, already running on Apple Silicon. So it already works I guess.

Yes, there's "Kegworks". I use it to run the steam edition of dwarf fortress, which mostly works fine on my M4 mac mini.

That is where Apple's GPTK (Game Porting Toolkit) came into play, and why Whiskey was popular at all. It allows for somewhat seamless interop between Wine and D3DMetal, which is an Apple translation layer from DirectX 11/12 instructions directly to Metal (Apple's Graphics API). Given that the majority of the cycles for video games are consumed by these graphics APIs, having that direct translation layer allows for fairly performant gameplay on Apple Silicon macs.

Tried Noita on an M2 Air. Yikes, unplayable.

The thing is, "Apple Silicon" computers are very fast. They are, obviously, not the fastest computers you can possibly buy, but rather than monetize fast CPU cores Apple mainly monetizes SSD and RAM and does minimal segmentation on the CPU, so even the lowest end Mac devices are absurdly fast compared to low end PCs. Rosetta is also pretty fast, depending on the workload, since the hardware is specialized to support fast x86 emulation.

I reckon a lot of games on Apple Silicon would end up GPU bound before CPU bound.

Really need the fan to maintain clocks while stressing the CPU and GPU. Still depending on the game the Air can still be pretty impressive, especially for native games.

I used Whisky with M1 and M3 Macbooks. It certainly helped me run games much faster than a $300 Windows laptop ever could.

I played horizon zero dawn on my M2 Air. It ran in 1080p and better than on my old PC on 720p (i5 4570, gtx 960). I had to plug it in and follow the wiki though. There's a regedit change to do for some cpu frequency thing, otherwise the games runs in slow motion - not slowly as in low framerate, the framerate is good, it's just time passing slowly.

> Does something like Whisky work in the new macOS Apple Silicon world?

From what I understand, Whisky only works with macOS Sonoma and Sequoia anyway.

Kegworks [1] works with Mavericks and Ventura, and WineBottler for Intel Macs.

[1] https://github.com/Kegworks-App/Kegworks

Thats fair, I have yet to upgrade to a modern Mac, I'm still on Intel, which is why I ask. Thank you for your comment :)

CPU benchmarks such as PassMark does not indicate that Apple Silicon has a performance edge over Intel or AMD CPUs in any price range: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

Here's where they shine, https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

The pricing issue is complicated because you can't consider the price of the Apple CPU on its own. However, you can get a Mac with 16 GiB of RAM, 256 GiB of SSD storage, and 10 cores of Apple M4 for $600. Even if you use the least charitable benchmarks for the M4, that is going to put it way above a similarly-priced PC. Of course, once you start upgrading the RAM and SSD, the prices will lift into the sky.

Because Wine is a translation layer for Windows APIs into what the host operating system requires. Including translating DirectX into Vulkan/Metal.

>Does something like Whisky work in the new macOS Apple Silicon world?

That is specifically what it was designed to do.

It actually works really well. Rosetta is fast enough (together with the incredible single thread performance of Apple CPUs).

There are some pain points that Apple could easily fix:

- Add a barrier API that more closely resembles that of Vulkan, which is easier to use and more flexible than both Metal and D3D12. Microsoft also basically copied the Vulkan barrier API in a D3D12 update but no games use that yet. The regular D3D12 barrier API can be implemented very well on top of the Vulkan barrier model but maps poorly to Metal.

- Open source MetalD3D and/or the Metal shader converter.

- Document the Metal shader bytecode format. It has been reverse engineered and it's mostly just LLVM bitcode anyway. Right now some tools like MoltenVK compile to Metal Shading Language (modified C++) which then gets compiled to Apple Intermediate Representation which then gets compiled to something the GPU can work with.

- Add a bunch of other Metal features like strict robustness guarantees (return 0 for out of bounds reads).

- Support optionally making specific folders in the file system case insensitive. The Linux kernel got support for that for Wine.

- Support the weird Windows NT sync edge cases in the kernel. The Linux kernel also recently got support for that for Wine.

- Add an API to Metal to allow mapping Metal buffers at a specific address in memory to help running 32 bit games.

- Add an optional reduced precision mode for x87 in Rosetta. (Turn the software emulated 80 bit floats into proper 64 bit floats).

To my eye that looks essentially like a tie, which may seem like not that big of a deal.

When I run compilation and multithreaded integration tests on my chonky AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores, 32 threads) on Ubuntu 24.04, and on my 2020 M1 Mac mini (8 cores), *the mini keeps up*. It’s quite impressive.

Yes, it's a bit of overhead, but todays software is already so full of layers upon layers. Every Electron app is much heavier than Wine.

From personal experience/experimentation, on a Macbook with a top-of-the-line M3 Max chip, GTAV runs perfectly at 60fps, Elden Ring runs on fairly high settings at ~45fps, and CS2 pulls 30-40fps and may be optimizable to 60. God of War (2022) is also playable, though a bit laggy with the default settings. So the hardware is more than capable, even with the translation layer.