Mac Gaming to Gain DirectX 12 Support via CrossOver 23

[Heat_Fan89]

It's a shame that Microsoft used its dominance back in the 90's to squelch OpenGL. I have always preferred OpenGL vs DirectX. The games looked better and ran better with OpenGL.

 

[mfuhrer]

I look forward to trying out this new version with Heroic Games Launcher, which supports launching GOG and Epic store titles through CrossOver.

 

[tubular]

Who cares about Diablo 2 when Diablo 4 is what everyone wants?

I'd do metaphorical backflips if I could play D2R on my Mac.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Sounds like a confused exec. Probably was under the impression that Mac has the same App Store restrictions as iOS does. Blizzard, of course, distributes it's remaining Mac titles via Battle.net, exactly the same way as it does on Windows.



Thing is, most new indy titles coming out on Steam do support Mac right out of the gate. From that perspective, Mac gaming is probably better than it's ever been! It's the big studios that aren't interested in Mac support.

Yeah, if it wasn’t clear I’m just a little bitter about how they treated Overwatch, in more than one way.

But I just have to let that go. I mostly just use the Switch now if that tells you anything.

I have been meaning to see how No Man’s Sky runs on my M1 Pro 14”. But I can’t tear myself away from Zelda TOTK.

Other than things like that I think you’re probably right, best to just look to future software and not expect ports of existing Windows / Xbox games.

 

[Apple Fan 2008]

Not Mac gaming again If you want to play games buy a console or windows machine...

Me when someone asks which consoles I own:

 

[genovelle]

More games on Mac is great, but Apple needs to support games natively. Compatibility layers bring new issues and bugs. Maybe bring DX12+ support to MacOS as built in functionality? I know they want to pump Metal though.

One of the Apple Silicon engineers said Mac Gaming is now a priority. That was the first I’d heard them say that. I believe their intent is to change gaming completely with their new platform.

 

[loopy123]

Metal is evolving. Some of the limitations that really caused problems for game devs have been removed over time and I’d bet metal will continue to improve. Because of the incredible bandwidth from gpu to memory metal GPUS on Mx Max can outperform high end nvidia cards which have a much higher theoretical performance.

 

[mensah]

Apple should be supporting these efforts. This "gaming" issue with Macs is not only comical at this point it borders on negligence. Lacklustre gaming is in the top 5 reasons people don't transition off windows.

 

[svish]

Good to hear that more games will possibly come to Mac

 

[Havoc035]

One of the Apple Silicon engineers said Mac Gaming is now a priority. That was the first I’d heard them say that. I believe their intent is to change gaming completely with their new platform.

What’s the source for this?

 

[jinnj]

Uh, no. I had the Steam client on Macs for more than a decade.

Unfortunately, the death of 32-bit and the new Apple Silicon means some of my favorites bit the dust, and I have to go to my gaming PC to play them.

Intel is now trying to kill 32-bit on it's CPUs.

 

[jinnj]

Sounds really good and exciting. A bit worried about the scalability of it though given this statement



Sounds like it’ll be very labor intensive, at least for some time.

Not really. Crossover creates these recipes to run the Win32 programs but you also have the option to run them yourself and add/remove components as needed. There are other apps that do the same. I support Crossover mainly because they are WINE developers so all enhancements make it to WINE.

 

[jinnj]

If you know how to increase the color without making the screen darker, I'm all ears. I returned a MacBook because with the Display Calibration Assistant, you could only change the gamma, which boosts the color but also makes the image darker. On top of that, the calibrator is way too complicated to use and is buried deep in the System folder (the relevant one). What I'm referring to is more akin to the display settings on your TV.

Dude. System Preferences -> Display, in there is a dropdown menu for Color Profile. If you don't like the ones available. Choose "Customize". In your comment you mention "you could only change the gamma" and "too complicated to use". Pick one.

 

[MacBH928]

I do not advice any one to get codeweavers

• The app is $64 per year, after that you are on your own or buy again
• No gurantees on anything working
• Apple move to ARM and RAM limits, made running any windows app/game even more difficult
• Developers behind the app are out of touch with the user base and I find customer support lacking
• Expect your computer fans to blow up and your CPU to heat like crazy

save yourself the yearly $64 , get a used computer or laptop or even buy new, and save yourself the headaches. If any one have any other experience with Crossover please share.

Yes its mind blowing that you can run Windows apps on MacOS but as far as I see, its a weak solution

 

[bousozoku]

Speaking of Steam, It’d be nice if they fixed Half Life 1/2 and portal 1/2 on Mac etc

Yes, a 64-bit version of Source would be good to power those games. The Steam launcher is still a bit of a problem when switching from Library to Store, at least, on my MacBook Air M1 fully loaded machine.

 

[vatter69]

I do not advice any one to get codeweavers

• The app is $64 per year, after that you are on your own or buy again
• No gurantees on anything working
• Apple move to ARM and RAM limits, made running any windows app/game even more difficult
• Developers behind the app are out of touch with the user base and I find customer support lacking
• Expect your computer fans to blow up and your CPU to heat like crazy

save yourself the yearly $64 , get a used computer or laptop or even buy new, and save yourself the headaches. If any one have any other experience with Crossover please share.

Yes its mind blowing that you can run Windows apps on MacOS but as far as I see, its a weak solution

Cant support this statement at all.

I have been using Crossover for years. You can buy the yearly license on Blackfriday for 30ish. The upgrade
per year is then another 30ish.

Everytime i submitted a bug report i got a response from a person - not just a bot. Often enough it was fixed soon enough.

When the upgrade from 32-64 bit happened - they were not only first to implement this but also gave like free months on your yearly subscription while they were ironing out bugs.

DX 12 support on Apple Silicon on Bootcamp/Paralles/VMWare ? Exactly right.

Is it perfect? Guess not. And the translation layer will not be easy on an already loud Intel based mac.

But my user experience vastly differs from what you described.

 

[MysticCow]

One of the Apple Silicon engineers said Mac Gaming is now a priority. That was the first I’d heard them say that. I believe their intent is to change gaming completely with their new platform.

I’ll believe it when they buy a game studio.

 

[Pezimak]

What were your favorites that bit the dust?

I can understand companies not investing time to bring their old 32-bit games to 64-bit, or their old OpenGL games to Metal, but companies that aren't bringing even their latest games to Apple Silicon and Metal and just plain lazy... especially if they're using a game engine like UE or Unity.

It's sad that I have to pirate Windows games to play them on the Mac (nobody should be buying a Windows game to play on the Mac because it just feeds the problem and developers don't know that you're playing it on the Mac) even though the Mac is more than capable of running these games emulated or interpreted through multiple layers that slow the game down.

But I bought both Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky because I support the companies that make the effort (even though Hello Games took their sweet time)... now if Feral can release Grid Legends.

Why would anyone spend time resources and money converting their games to run on Apple Silicon Macs? Which are a tiny percentage of less than double digit percentage of the global PC market?

 

[Romain_H]

One of the Apple Silicon engineers said Mac Gaming is now a priority. That was the first I’d heard them say that. I believe their intent is to change gaming completely with their new platform.

Its unclear, though, which platform he was talking about. Could be the mobile platforms as well as the Mac

 

[Mr_Ed]

Apple creating Vulkan drivers would make it easier for game devs to port to macs. However, if you’ve seen some of the ports that actually implemented Metal API’s too/instead, you would see that the metal backend is 100x better.

Look at the speed increases the Dolphin emulator achieved after adding a metal backend. It lets an m1 MacBook Air compete with high end PC graphics.

What I think Apple really needs to do is to really start advocating (paying) devs to build on Metal and train up the one of developers on it.

How good Metal API may be means exactly jack if the only platform using it is Mac.

If you are a major studio and/or publisher the user base gain from Macs probably looks close to insignificant compared to the combined gamer base on PC and consoles. The investment in supporting one more divergent platform may simply not be worth it. Many games out there use something other than Unreal or Unity. Many use custom engines so the cost for adding support rests entirely with them.

The sad thing is this is not at all a new situation. The investment math for supporting Mac was never great, even before consoles became as popular as they are now. Apple has never acted in any way that indicates they understand the math. Maybe they just don’t want to. They’ll happily carry on happy to say “well, our API is technically superior” and do absolutely nothing substantive to encourage support for Mac gaming from the gaming industry.

I really don’t think Apple cares about gaming outside of the mobile space. And you know what? Maybe that investment math is simply better for them anyway.

 

[Picklefoot]

Why would anyone spend time resources and money converting their games to run on Apple Silicon Macs? Which are a tiny percentage of less than double digit percentage of the global PC market?

Because it's even more money in their greedy little pockets. Simple!

 

[MysticCow]

If you are a major studio and/or publisher the user base gain from Macs probably looks close to insignificant compared to the combined gamer base on PC and consoles.

Which is why a bunch of them went to Aspyr in the PowerPC days. We got games back then but it took forever and by the time we got Game A, the rest of the game world was on Game R.

PLUS, to get timely ports 1 GHz is 1 GHz, regardless of processor architecture. That came directly from Aspyr. They also said not to ever expect AltiVec or whatever else Apple tried to push, because the port needed to be as timely as possible.

Because it's even more money in their greedy little pockets. Simple!

You don’t understand business. When investment > profit, you don’t invest.

 

[Mr_Ed]

Which is why a bunch of them went to Aspyr in the PowerPC days. We got games back then but it took forever and by the time we got Game A, the rest of the game world was on Game R.

PLUS, to get timely ports 1 GHz is 1 GHz, regardless of processor architecture. That came directly from Aspyr. They also said not to ever expect AltiVec or whatever else Apple tried to push, because the port needed to be as timely as possible.

Ah yes. The ”good old days” of Mac gaming 😄

Did that for quite a while. Then I started dual-booting Windows on my Intel MacPro so I could play relatively recently released games with friends. Then I started building my own Windows machines. Haven’t looked back.

My son has recently discovered he really enjoys playing Battlefield 2042. We play together with him on a hand-me-down PC, while I use a more recent build. Being able to play a style of game I enjoy with my boy is priceless!

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Great shame that Diablo II Resurrected does not have native Mac support. Blizzard used to be big supporters of the Mac and, back in the day, all their titles (including Diablo II) were released simultaneously on Mac and Windows. But that's all changed since the Activision buy-out. Seems like a "no Mac" edict has been issued from the top-level management.

More like Apple has changed architecture roughly every decade, and it just costs too much to keep updating a decade old app for the new architecture. Better to just not support it for the few mac users right from the beginning.

 

[tubular]

More like Apple has changed architecture roughly every decade, and it just costs too much to keep updating a decade old app for the new architecture. Better to just not support it for the few mac users right from the beginning.

This is a huge part of the problem. It doesn't matter how good your graphics API story is if you change it every five years. I *hope* that Apple throwing all their weight behind Metal and tile-based deferred rendering on Apple Silicon GPU cores is a sign that it's going to be around a loooong time. But really, by failing to embrace Vulkan while deprecating OpenGL, they built the walls of their walled garden just that much higher.