Nice; that raises some interesting questions as to what Valve is planning here. Steam/Proton on macs would make a lot of sense for them hard as it may be. People booting linux on their macs to play games would really annoy Apple probably.
I have a bet going that their next Steam Deck is going to have an ARM processor.
Allegedly NVidia is working on a WoA SoC, now that Qualcomm's contract with MS has ended. If NVidia puts their recent capital gains into a performant ARM chip like Apple (tapeout alone would likely run in the billion-dollar range), we can hopefully expect AMD to respond with something soon after. Once the chipsets are available, it's a matter of getting Linux to work with mixed page-size processes.
I have no idea how possible that is, but if the emulation performance is anything like Rosetta and the M1 proved possible, most users won't even notice.
> People booting linux on their macs to play games would really annoy Apple probably.
You dont have to boot Linux to play PC games on Mac.
Apple already provides the tools you need to build a Mac native equivalent to Proton.
There are several options built using those tools, both paid {Crossover) and free/open source (Whisky).
Whisky combines the same ooen source Wine project that Proton leverages with Apple's Rosetta x86 emulation and Apple's DirectX emulation layer (part of the Game Porting Toolkit) into a single easy to use tool.
The problem here is that apple only provides Metal as the graphics driver. This solution instead creates a native Vulkan driver which has solutions to hardware<->vulkan incompatibilities built in at the driver level.
Proton and Alyssa's solution use Vulkan on Linux as their native graphics API.
Regardless, you have to provide a translation layer so that Windows games written to call DirectX APis use the native graphics layer of the platform you are running on.
Unless you happen to be emulating a Windows game written to use Vulkan instead of DirectX, Vulkan really doesn't matter at all on the Mac.
If you do want to emulate one of the rare Vulkan based Windows games on a Mac, the MoltenVK translation layer handles that.
The problem is that Whisky is not for the casual user.
I used it and found it confusing at first. Imagine your average gamer, they'd never get past dragging in the app. The Steam Deck (and Proton) have been so successful because you can just power on the Deck and use it. No tinkering or third-party tools to do what you want.
That's certainly not what the reviews of Whisky had to say, although I have seen it said that buying a Crossover license gets you more hand holding than a free copy of Whisky does.
