As John Siracusa discussed on this week's ATP[0], it's incredible how much effort Apple puts into this considering the result. Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware and the hardware is also amazing for the power envelopes it is wrapped in.<p>But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners.<p>Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?<p>I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all.<p>[0] <a href="https://atp.fm/538" rel="nofollow">https://atp.fm/538</a> @1:42:20
Keep in mind, it's getting 15fps at 1440x900. It's not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 is a great experience. It's merely pointing out that it's technically possible (which is a massive achievement).
Running at ~40 fps on M2 Max:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpunk_on_m2_max_wgame_porting_toolkit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...</a>
This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.
This is total speculation on my part, but I do wonder why Apple have suddenly got this out the door to developers right at the same moment their headset is announced. They’ve never seemed very interested in this section of the games market before.<p>I wonder if this could be the first building block of allowing existing modern 3D games to play in some kind of new semi immersive way inside. I’m imagining playing an FPS on a huge wrap around screen with some adjustable depth perception. That could potentially open up a huge market.
Man if Apple somehow could have their own Windows emulation layer similar to Valve's Steamdeck developments - I could see myself returning to the Mac. It would be so amazing. The Mac would become truly a gaming platform, regardless if it costs twice the price of an equivalent PC - since people who appreciate Apple's hardware and software will see its value.<p>Having said that there's still the issue of upgrades. But again, I have to replace pretty much my entire PC every 5 years (new CPU needs a new mobo, needs new RAMs etc). So hmm.<p>edit: as an aside an interesting question.. I wonder if Valve's efforts, having incentivized developers to make their games more Steamdeck compatible - and hence more "predictable" in terms of how they access Windows APIs - would also make it easier for Apple to translate the games - even if the target is different.
From what I gather, Game Porting Toolkit is two things - a fork of Wine, and their own adaptation/extension of open source projects for DirectX compatibility. Some observations:<p>Windows compatibility:<p>* Windows platform compatibility is achieved with a slightly patched version of Codeweavers' Wine fork - virtually all of the hard work of Windows compatibility has been achieved by the Wine developers and Codeweavers and was already available open source before today.<p>* Interestingly, Apple is distributing this thing as a Homebrew library. Has Apple ever done this before? [1]<p>DirectX compatibility:<p>* In addition, outside of the core Wine based stuff, there's a framework called
D3DMetal.framework. This is a DirectX 9-12 compatibility layer akin to DXVK used in Proton as a compatibility layer from DirectX 9-11 to <i>Vulkan</i>. This is what seems to be the game changer here compared to before. Before today, running DirectX on macOS was possible but lost a lot of performance and compatibility needing to go through Apple's old OpenGL support or a third party Vulkan intermediary layer in MoltenVK. This is direct (heh) first party Direct3D to Metal translation.<p>* Actually, it's more than "akin to DXVK". The D3DMetal.framework contains copyright attribution to DXVK as required under their MIT license. It's quite likely Apple ported a lot of DXVK to Metal. It's worth noting that DXVK itself doesn't support Direct3D 12 though, Proton uses another LGPL2.1 licensed library called VKD3D for that.<p>* However, D3DMetal.framework is very much not open source itself. Its license is actually very restrictive, seemingly only permitting use for game development/QA use cases. [2]<p>* The restrictive license seems to make it harder for someone like Valve to use this akin to how they use Proton on Linux in a sanctioned way. Apple seems intent on preventing developers from dumping their games on macOS with just their compatibility layer. It definitely won't stop hobbyists making better tools to continue run Windows games on Macs though.<p>* The fact that D3DMetal.framework appears to support DirectX 9 and 10 is interesting. No new commercial efforts use those anymore, so that's just there for what? Allowing homebrewers to run their 00s era Windows games?<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula">https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula</a><p>[2]: It contains a license with the following language - "you are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, personal copyright license to (i) install, internally use, and test the Apple Software for the sole purpose of developing, testing, or evaluating video games for use on Apple-branded products".
So... why is this not an end-user product like Proton on SteamOS?<p>Is this actually going to do anything for Mac gaming considering it's only meant for game developers for... testing? What kind of workflow is Apple envisioning here?
What is the game porting toolkit?<p>Is this something that game devs would use or is this some wrapper or emulation layer for the end user?<p>Is there a list of games that use it?
When people discuss Apple efforts in gaming, they tend to forget that this company owns second largest in the world, after Android, game platform. And with Vision, they could easily become the largest VR gaming platform in the world, even though this might not be the immediate focus upon release — but iPhone didn't have any games on release either.<p>Mentioning partnership with Unity in Vision announcement presentation is very significant. It is the most used game engine in the world (especially if you count by game installations) which dominates mobile market, and it has been developing VR/AR capabilities for many years now, even though it arguably doesn't have the same AAA graphics as Unreal.
apple is getting too much credit for this. they are essentially bootstrapping on the long-term efforts made at winehq.<p>i would like to know what value-add they have done besides making it work better at os level. i would be more impressed if they contributed to improving the translation itself like valve has done with the proton project and by contributing directly to the main project.
Am I the only person wondering why they wouldn’t demo medium/high settings on a higher framerate?
Being able to run at ultra at all is quite cool, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if you were able to run the game with 60fps at all? Is there something I’m missing?
This guy got 30-40fps, idk what settings.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpunk_on_m2_max_wgame_porting_toolkit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...</a>
This is my daily driver device and Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best video games I've ever played, so this has me very excited. Would love to take a break from code to play a few minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the same device I daily drive...
I truly wonder if Microsoft didn’t help with this port. Looking at the speed and quality of this port. It seems that Apple and Microsoft are working closer than ever. Maybe some execs of Microsoft asked for to be in this demo.
Well, I tried running it on my MBP M1 Max 64gb and whilst it works great (in low res, it does not go max on 4K with acceptable fps), it gets really hot. Just don’t game on a laptop.
nice proof of concept about the highest settings, gamers only care about 60fps minimum so should probably find/post a tweet showing those settings<p>then gamers will move the goalpost to cost of the machine, but thats okay
I guess the video looks okay but the Twitter embed video quality is dog shit. Maybe post the video somewhere like YouTube instead that supports higher quality.
How are Wine and friends actually legal considering the Oracle v Google thing on Java?<p>I've always loved it but really do wonder. That was a blasphemous verdict.
This actually makes me wonder if I should sell my Apple stocks, that they even put out something like this (even if only as an "evaluation tool" and based on CrossOvers GPL code) screams as an validation that there is enough developers ignoring Apple/Metal that they're actually starting to hurt from a lack of titles.<p>Sure, everyone doing Unity or Unreal will probably have the middleware take care of the biggest differences and Vulkan being too verbose has kept back the field, but given a choice Metal will still be an afterthought for those making custom engines.<p>One could hope for updated OpenGL/Vulkan support, but nobody is holding their breath anymore.