| ▲ | jsheard 13 hours ago |
| 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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| ▲ | radialstub 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I believe this work is a continuation of the work the asahi linux people did to get games working on M-series macs. It seems Alyssa Rosenzweig works at valve as a contractor. Super cool work. Some seriously talented folks. |
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| ▲ | LeonM 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Alyssa works for Intel now, so I doubt she'll be doing much contract work for Valve anymore... | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them. | | |
| ▲ | trenchpilgrim 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | On her website it says she is working on GPU drivers there - I wouldn't be surprised if that's something she greatly enjoys and Intel gave her then opportunity to work on official, production shipping drivers instead of reverse engineered third party drivers. | |
| ▲ | neilv 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If I were Intel, this sounds like a great person to give an R&D skunkworks dream job. Potential lottery ticket win, they are available for consulting internally anywhere that can add value, and they're not working for anyone else. | |
| ▲ | forgotoldacc 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I imagine there's also some challenging work that would be fun to dig into. Being the person who can clean up Intel's problems would be quite a reputation to have. | |
| ▲ | whizzter 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real. | |
| ▲ | ikety 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability. | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Would it shock you to hear that many/most engineers don't pick an employer based on brand reputation? | | |
| ▲ | collingreen an hour ago | parent [-] | | Would it shock you to hear that famous engineers with their own personal brand power have different opportunities and motivations than many/most engineers? | | |
| ▲ | vasco 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Their point is even made stronger by your comment. Engineers of this type don't experience megacorps like regular engineers. They usually have a non-standard setup and more leeway and less bureaucracy overhead. Which means brand isn't the biggest thing, the specific projects and end user impact are. |
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| ▲ | KerrAvon 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | usually a combination of money/benefits/locale is the answer to this question |
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| ▲ | gregorvand an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | write up on that here: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html |
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| ▲ | Yokolos 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493 This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment: > Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus. > Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future. It's mentioned in this issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8136 which was closed Oct 2024 with this comment by kisak-valve: > Hello @Theleafir1, similar to #1493, this is not a realistic objective for Proton any time in the near future. |
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| ▲ | baq 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Finally some clarification on what valve time actually is. | | |
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| ▲ | teroshan 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Valve deciding to support Arm-based gaming is HUGE news |
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| ▲ | pdpi 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Have to wonder if there is a world where Proton comes to macOS. |
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| ▲ | jsheard 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | GeekyBear 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | jsheard 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | derefr 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | thefz 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Nope because they could not gouge developes with pricy tools, steep registration fees and cutthroat slice of their sales on Apple's app market. | |
| ▲ | jsheard 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | happymellon 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > compatibility layers have overhead Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again. cough /final cut/ cough | |
| ▲ | Cloudef 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Target apple and in 5 years your binary wont work anymore anyways |
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| ▲ | tick_tock_tick 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Apple could but Apple would rather die they allow something to work cross platform. | | |
| ▲ | davely 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think they are also absolutely addicted to cruddy pay to win mobile games and they don’t want to give up that sweet drip feed of IAP that they get a 30% cut of… which is substantial. For funsies, try searching App Store apps and find a way to filter out results for apps with IAP. Nope! (Source: me, who spent time at a mobile gaming company as we figured out how to continuously optimize our funnels so that some rich dudes in Qatar could continue to spend $40K a month on useless cosmetics.) | | |
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| ▲ | samtheprogram 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | jsheard 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | GeekyBear 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | pdpi 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | samtheprogram 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | GeekyBear 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | alessandroberna 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They could also use MoltenVK |
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| ▲ | sgentle 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | DXMT has been advancing very quickly: https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt | |
| ▲ | miohtama 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wouldn't it be Apple's benefit to get more gaming on MacOS? Their goals might align with Steam. Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it. | | |
| ▲ | WhyNotHugo 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Valve seems to break free form depending on someone else’s walled garden. Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden. Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software. | | |
| ▲ | evilduck 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hard to swallow. Every day I sit down at a Mac for work and proceed to launch VS Code, Zed, Outlook, DBeaver, Excel, Teams, LogSeq, Syncthing, Chrome, Firefox, LM Studio and Docker. I prefer MacOS but basically all of my application workflow exists for Windows verbatim and if using browser versions of the MS apps, on Linux too. |
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| ▲ | pdpi 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | True, forgot about that. That said, Apple does have D3DMetal. A man can dream that they eventually opensource that. | |
| ▲ | easyThrowaway 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, theoretically they could backport the D3DMetal wine driver from the Game Porting Toolkit. Also I remember there was some early preliminary work done on stock wine a few years ago. Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times. |
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| ▲ | philo23 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I believe that was part of the original plan for Proton, but with the success of the Steam Deck that got shelved and it moved to a focus purely on Linux. I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment. CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory. | |
| ▲ | bsimpson 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I did catch that the streaming stick for the Valve Frame in the announcement video was plugged into a computer that looked an awful lot like a Mac. | |
| ▲ | GeekyBear 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux. The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM. Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine. |
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| ▲ | derefr 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| There was also a parallel effort to this end, targeting Android rather than plain Linux, resulting in an app called https://winlator.org/ — which also works quite well at this point. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0yUqcyY18) |
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| ▲ | pippy360 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | That was a very higher quality YT video. It's clearly written by someone who knows when they're talking about even though it's mostly non-technical |
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