Mac Gaming Sucks...but that's CHANGING!

this is a gaming PC and I'm not talking about the slow trickle of afterthought releases that make PC ports look good by comparison thanks to Apple's new game porting toolkit not only will the process of porting games to Mac be much simpler for developers but Gamers can play PC games today right now on Apple silicon Max who'd have thought it after all these years of giving

zero cares whatsoever about Gamers is Apple finally bringing the fight to Microsoft and gaming is it any good am I about to make the switch to talking about our sponsor build Redux is building a PC not in your wheelhouse no problem let the experts at build Redux help you out just pick the parts and they'll do all the hard work check them out at the link

down below our setup which Emily is just putting the finishing touches on right now is an M1 Ultra Max studio with 128 gigs of unified memory we're running Mac OS Sonoma which works best with the game importing toolkit right now and we actually need to use two versions of steam the Mac native one and the windows one the Mac version is easy that's it theoretically this

is working now but the windows version of steam must be run from the command line for reasons that we're going to get into in a bit more detail later of course there's no window snapping on Mac because why would there be you can just pay for that if you want it you can it's a nice app you know what it doesn't matter the point is we're

gonna try some games see bear pool okay yeah cyberpunk hey hey whoa okay I know you did most of the work before I came here and obviously it's not that easy but like it's it's working it would have been more easy if the the GUI method worked but it should be video much easier in the future instructions say adjust graphic settings and resolution and see what

happens to frame rate I see looks like right now we're at about 20. let's go to something more reasonable medium is this likely to actually complete are you just trolling me well I mean there's only one way to find out I mean if you hit the space bar it might proceed one way to find out is to ask you if you're just trolling me oh it's

running uh 11 FPS it does not look great well I mean it looks okay as long as you only look at like still frames uh-huh the still frames don't look great well we're at 720p you could boost the resolution uh I mean I could wait it's not running any worse the truth is I'm kind of speechless right now it's not perfect the performance obviously sucks and

at times Steam and or the game might crash or become unresponsive but this is still amazing and there are workarounds if you do experience a crash just open the activity monitor search for wine select all processes then click the arrows in the top right and click force quit wait a second wine how does a piece of Linux software that is not an emulator figure into all

of this here's the thing gain porting toolkit is essentially a distribution of codeweaver's crossover flavor of wine with what appears to be the dxvk translation layer for DirectX 9-11 and then Apple's own Homespun d3d metal translation wrapper for DirectX 12 which isn't without controversy thing is apple has a history of using open source tools to enrich their own proprietary Solutions like cups for printing and the

khtml browser engine that became Safari's webkit and ultimately Chrome and like these other situations game porting toolkit is perfectly legal but is understandably rubbing some members of the open source Community the wrong way given both Apple's restrictive licensing agreement for the toolkit and their historically narrow contributions back to open source software now my notes Here only say move move on at your discretion of the nine

games installed five of them work correct I want to play sieve oh fine how about holiday let's go Hollow Knight the controls for this game on a keyboard and mouse I truthfully have no idea holy crap this is running at 60 FPS and actually feels I mean I suck but other than that it feels fine input lag hard to say even though this is a bit

of a Twitchy game I find it kind of forgiving in terms of input lag I didn't have trouble playing it on the Logitech gcloud for example it seems pretty good I would say it seems pretty darn good I mean it seems like from the sound to what I'm seeing on screen it seems pretty decent like maybe there's a little bit but it's definitely usable compatibility is

a mixed bag then which makes sense given the similarity to valve's proton compatibility layer for Linux and also makes sense considering the extra step that's going on here of running through the Rosetta translation layer which handles running x86 code on Apple silicon and unlike proton very few support packages are installed by default which can make things problematic if you're trying to use it like proton it's

also worth noting that while d3d metal is closed Source crossover is gaining support for DirectX 12 this year too so game porting toolkit might not be the only option for Gamers on Mac though of course it's really intended to be let's go F1 let's go oh your version of Windows is older than the minimum version required yes I wish to continue we're sorry but you can't

my God oh my God okay let's go gamers oh crap well I suck this overlay in the corner here shows us how much performance we're leaving on the table due to translation layers and not emulation it's a lot we're using about 20 of our GPU right now and apple knows that but that's okay because the general idea behind this tool and apple was very clear about

it is that a developer using a common framework like Unity or Unreal Engine can simply compile a Mac version of their software without having to rewrite the graphics audio or input routines that they've already written for Windows they're not supposed to just use it like this and all of that sounds great but as we know it's not always that simple in the real world before we

talk about that though let's discuss the advantages of this approach but the biggest one being the it just works Simplicity but unfortunately that's about it I mean in theory it does make it easier to create a native version of your game as well but if the way things are going on Linux is anything to go by the translation layer forever approach is the more likely outcome

so then let's talk about the drawbacks of that the first is that performance should in theory be pretty close to proton on Linux so usually worse than Windows sometimes equal or even better and the second is that if developers are not motivated to create true native ports this compatibility and performance is always going to be behind and by more than non-gamer Apple Executives probably realize the

thing is even a compatible game might have dependencies that are not created by the developer like say for example anti-cheat the developers of which have very little incentive to Port their software to these Rando not properly supported platforms let's see if we can find one like that like say Halo and infinite yeah okay that didn't take long see you later buddy I mean I don't actually

know that that's because of anti-cheat but it almost certainly isn't helping but you told me there was an anti-cheat one that you did manage to get working and I assume it's this because this is all that's left yes Elden ring is the only one that I got to work with anti-cheat so the idea behind it though is that instead of doing anything special what you do

is you rename the Antichrist executable because it starts up and then scans things and then it launches the game you rename that executable then you rename the games executable to that executable's name so then steam just launches the game the problem is that from there you don't have any online support whatsoever does that matter in Elden ring I mean it depends on how you play the

game you did there's actually quite a bit of multiplayer or you could just not do that wow oh wait oh okay no no that worked I swear the first time I whacked one of those pots there was a delayed reaction for it to crumble it might have been Shader compilation that makes sense okay that wasn't on me I had that lined up I swear it do

you see that I can't really see much just no don't lie you saw that from this angle all I see is just a bunch of grave logs no I editor helped me out here yeah I was lined up with the big one I have no idea what you're talking about oh hey did you notice no it was at like 15 now it's like 37. what what

shut up that can't be running at 37 FPS oh no way Elden Rings actually running kind of okay I guess it needed to warm up the shaders interesting 30 FPS Elven ring what resolution though and we got those results with the GPU at 20 and before even hydrating with this water bottle from lttstore.com it's empty whatever it doesn't matter the point is it's a very mixed

bag and not everyone wants to just buy and try random games and there's no proton DB for Mac yet but what there is is a community curated Google sheet that is full of lots of interesting nuggets here are some interesting ones Halo infinite crashed on the crossover wine that is used in GPT and I don't mean chat GPT I mean game porting toolkit but it works

with proton and given its anti-cheat and Microsoft account dependencies I suspect that that's only the case because valve had to do some special sauce to get that working and I have to say I wonder if Apple will be willing to put in the work probably not given that their stated purpose is for developers to be the one to do the work how optimistic more on that

later also any game that requires AVX or AVX 2 instructions will fail Apple silicon doesn't support it and neither does the Rosetta translation layer vsync also appears to be enforced by the positor regardless of the in-game settings so you will only ever get your display's refresh rate in fps also getting it to work as a pain involving terminal commands and the x86 version of Homebrew Isaac

maravitz the person who posted the infamous video of running cyberpunk on a Mac modified his whiskey app to support the game porting toolkit but the most recent version as of us recording this doesn't work though I suspect by the time we release this video it will be patched so keep an eye on that back to that developer conversation though apple is going to have to support

and promote this tool heavily to overcome their reputation among game developers they have a long history of ignoring the gaming industry dating back to Steve Jobs according to programming Legend John Carmack Gabe Newell la valve claimed that Apple kept coming to them talking about supporting games but just nothing would ever come of it and so far no major developers that I could find have publicly expressed

support besides hideo Kojima who Apple had present during their WWDC 2023 keynote where the game reporting toolkit was announced some high profile releases have been coming to Mac recently like Resident Evil Village and no man's sky and there are some mac native games in fact we've got a couple of them installed so I guess the question that this raises now is if all went according to

plan what kind of performance improvements might we see we don't get an FPS counter but I'm expecting the performance to be remarkably better than when we were running with the translation layer and it looks like weird camera bug aside it looks like it's a lot smoother the performance is way better like even if it's just 60 versus 60 the frame pacing is a lot better right

here you can tell much better and the latency is markedly better as well okay I'm gonna win this fight this time though oh come on we have more stuff to shoot today uh that's true okay I don't have time to win this fight but I do have time to talk about the different kinds of native games that run on Mac OS Total War is running on

one arm but uses Rosetta for some of the multiplayer whereas shadow of the Tomb Raider actually uses Rosetta for the port so from a CPU standpoint it's actually using the same tools that is Rosetta as the game porting toolkit the difference then would be basically this is running bare metal using the metal API whereas the game pointing toolkit version would be using d3d metal the translation

layer so that gives us some idea of how much we're losing to the translation layer yeah it's a lot worse than running on metal API but that shouldn't matter because if Apple can stop paying lip service to gaming and actually throw their hat into the ring the game porting toolkit could be a game changer in the way that they're presenting it as it is right now

though it's a curiosity at best for end users and time will tell if this is actually a useful tool that will motivate developers to Port their games natively which is yeah going to be necessary for a good experience just like this good experience telling you about our sponsor Micro Center this summer Micro Center is opening their first store in eight years in Indianapolis with two more

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this video why not check out our gaming on Linux Challenge Series maybe someday I'll be revisiting it from that all right wouldn't hold my breath though