> rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal

Am I reading that right? It makes API calls that go through 5 different layers before actually getting rendered? That's kind of crazy. I'm surprised it works, although I guess the underlying libraries are solid enough that it shouldn't be unexpected.

Apple never released a driver that supports Vulkan out of the box, therefore MoltenVK was born, which translates Vulkan IR to Metal source then recompiles to Metal shaders.

This was the pipeline in Proton for macOS (I'm not sure if it's still is the case, been quite a while since I checked).