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' 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
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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 macOS Sonoma which works best with the game
supporting 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
going to try TR some games sear puny
sear puny yeah cyber Punk hey hey who
okay I know you did most of the work before I came here and obviously it's
not that easy but like it's working it
would have been more easy if the uh the guey method worked but uh it should be B
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 or 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 uh
it does not look great well I mean it looks okay as long as you only look at
like still frames uhhuh yeah the still frames don't look great well we're at
720p you could boost the resolution I 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 Andor 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 game
porting toolkit is essentially a distribution of code Weaver's crossover
flavor of wine with what appears to be the dxvk translation layer for DirectX 9
through 111 and then Apple's own Homespun d3d metal translation wrapper
for directx12 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 web kit 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
on at your discretion of the nine games installed five of them work correct okay
I want to play Civ a fine how about Hollow
name let's go Hollow night what are 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 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 leg I didn't have trouble playing it on the Logitech g-cloud for
example it seems pretty good I would say it seems pretty darn good uh 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 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
direct X12 this year too so game porting toolkit might not be the only option for
gamers on Mac though of course it's not really intended to be let's go F1 let's
go a your version of Windows is older than
the minimum version required yes I wish to continue oh we're sorry but you can't
there is no fraking way that Halo infinite runs I mean you're not
currently running Halo infinite you're running I'm not running Halo infinite
cuz I don't think that's going to run I'm trying to find ones that will run
hey I think I found one the last total war game I played was Rome Total War the
remake or the original the original hey
this is running uh oh 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 with 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 though 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
examp example anti-che 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 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-che but it almost certainly isn't
helping but you told me there was an anti-che 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 antiche so the idea behind it though is
that instead of doing anything special what you do is you rename the anti chees
executable because it starts up and then scans things and then it launches the
game you rename that executable then you rename the game's executable to that executable 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 depends on how you
play the game ring you need online you do there's actually quite a bit of
multiplayer in ring 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 gray blob no I editor help me out
here I was lined up with the big one I
have no idea what you're talking about oh hey did you notice the FPS row no it
was at like 15 now it's like 37 what shut up that can't be running at 37 FPS
ooh no way Elden Ring's actually running
kind of okay I guess it needed to warm up the shaders
interesting 30 FPS Elden ring
I mean at what resolution though 1080p
maximum qual and we got those results
with the GPU at 20% and before even hydrating with this water bottle from
LTT Store.com it's empty whatever
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 tool kit
but it works with proton and given its anti-che 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 avx2 instructions will fail Apple silicon
doesn't support it and neither does their Rosetta translation layer vsync
also appears to be enforced by the compositor regardless of the in-game
settings so you will only ever get your displays refresh rate in FPS also
getting it to work is a pain involving terminal commands and the x86 version of
Homebrew Isaac maritz 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 released this video it will be patched so keep an eye
on that back to that developer conversation though Apple's 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 carac Gabe new of valve claimed that Apple kept coming
to them talking about supporting in games but just nothing would ever come
of it and so far no major developers that I could find have publicly
expressed support besides hideio kajima who Apple had present during their WWDC
2023 keynote where the game porting 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 markedly
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 um okay I'm going to 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 macOS Total War is
running on 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 ha haha using the metal API whereas the
game porting 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 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
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