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1173 points davikr | 12 comments | 12 Nov 25 17:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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teroshan ◴[12 Nov 25 18:10 UTC] No.45903562[source]▶
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe [1]

> Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor. With 16GB of RAM, Steam Frame supports stand-alone play on a growing number of both VR and non-VR games without needing to stream from your PC.

So Steam + Proton works on aarch64? Is this something already available/supported, or is this an announcement?

[1] Steam Frame, which is the VR Headset releasing alongside the Steam Machine. Dedicated discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325

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jsheard ◴[12 Nov 25 18:13 UTC] No.45903610[source]▶
Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now.

https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...

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pdpi ◴[12 Nov 25 20:09 UTC] No.45905754[source]▶
Have to wonder if there is a world where Proton comes to macOS.
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jsheard ◴[12 Nov 25 20:29 UTC] No.45906101[source]▶
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.
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1. GeekyBear ◴[12 Nov 25 20:36 UTC] No.45906255[source]▶
> 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.

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2. jsheard ◴[12 Nov 25 20:46 UTC] No.45906404[source]▶
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.
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3. samtheprogram ◴[12 Nov 25 21:03 UTC] No.45906639[source]▶
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.

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4. ◴[12 Nov 25 21:14 UTC] No.45906808{3}[source]▶
5. jsheard ◴[12 Nov 25 21:18 UTC] No.45906862{3}[source]▶
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.
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6. GeekyBear ◴[12 Nov 25 21:26 UTC] No.45906971{3}[source]▶
> 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.

7. GeekyBear ◴[12 Nov 25 21:39 UTC] No.45907129{4}[source]▶
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.

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8. derefr ◴[12 Nov 25 21:59 UTC] No.45907396[source]▶
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.
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9. jsheard ◴[12 Nov 25 22:05 UTC] No.45907459{3}[source]▶
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.

10. tick_tock_tick ◴[12 Nov 25 22:48 UTC] No.45907976{3}[source]▶
Apple could but Apple would rather die they allow something to work cross platform.
11. samtheprogram ◴[12 Nov 25 22:58 UTC] No.45908107{5}[source]▶
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.

12. pdpi ◴[12 Nov 25 23:06 UTC] No.45908175{5}[source]▶
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.