CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hi,

Can Codeweavers say a few words about the overall plans for the future related to the Game Porting Toolkit that Apple recently unveiled at WWDC? It appears they're either bundling a version of upstream Wine, or of Crossover itself (?!) with a heavily custom, Apple-written D3D12 renderer.

Questions would be:

1. Did Codeweavers work on this project with Apple?

2. Is Codeweavers able to use Apple's DX12 code paths from the Game Porting Toolkit in future releases of Crossover to support DX12 games?

3. Is there any particular reason why Apple's DX12 support is so good, that Codeweavers can learn from to improve their product? For example, on an M1 Max or M2 Max chip, many AAA games can be played at 30-60 FPS or even more. There are dozens of new games that suddenly work with Apple's -- essentially -- Wine fork, that never worked with Crossover, and the performance is better than Crossover's DX9, DX10 or DX11 translation for many games that Crossover does support. Furthermore, the "bug rate" (the rate of rendering errors) is impressively low on Game Porting Toolkit for games that successfully start and run.

I've heard a bunch of times from industry (but not officially from Apple) that they don't really want to support this type of emulation in general, because you're only getting about 50% of the performance of the silicon at best due to emulation overhead. Apple wants to use this tech to encourage developers to release native (MacOS universal binaries) versions of their games. But we all know that isn't going to happen; at least, not for the games people really want, like those developed by any of Microsoft's studios, or likely EA, Bethesda, etc.

Our best bet for getting native ports of AAA games is probably Blizzard bringing Diablo 4 to Mac, since they have a history of supporting Mac. Bethesda explicitly doesn't, and now that they're owned by Microsoft, that chance is even lower.

So, while Apple would ideally want to encourage devs to bring their games natively to Mac, the reality is that we continue to have a strong use case for a tool like Crossover that can run games through emulation. But the emulation in Game Porting Toolkit is so ridiculously good that it makes Crossover look a little bad, IMO. I know Codeweavers has a small, hard-working team, and I'm a lifetime license holder because I believe in the mission; but Apple's D3DMetal (or whatever their DX12 emulation is called) is just in a completely new class of its own; it's like nothing we've ever experienced on the Mac before.

As you probably know, Apple's license/EULA for the Game Porting Toolkit is explicitly excluding the ability to "play games for fun" -- the license basically says that you're supposed to use it for development purposes only and nothing else. OK, great, but there are still thousands of popular games, that people want to play, that don't run on Crossover, will never be ported to MacOS native, and do run on GPTK.

So where does that leave us? For the moment, it means that MacOS gamers either have to have a separate Windows PC or console for gaming (and I think everyone in this forum recognizes how much of a non-solution that is), or we have to violate the license agreement of Apple GPTK to play certain games. In the future, I hope Crossover can evolve to even exceed what GPTK is able to do, and retain the licensing model and ethos of explicitly supporting gamers who want to game on a Mac despite the stubbornness of certain developers who'll never support our platform.

Thanks for reading, and keep up the great work.

The changes Apple have actually done on the wine side was minimal and could easily be imported but the question is more should CodeWeavers open themselves upto dealing with all the then invalid bug reports this would generate. Most of the patches Apples had applied came from upstream wine.

I know most end-users haven’t really dug into this much but installing d3dmetal actual causes a large number of breakages for other application launches/games and in its current form won’t be compatible for wine-8.x based packages when using wow64.

Would CodeWeavers really want to deal with all the extra headaches with associated with even allowing it’s usage within CrossOver going forward?

Hi. Had you seen Meredith’s post on this: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-comes-to-macos-apple-s-game-porting-toolkit-powered-by-crossover-source-code

I believe the answers to your questions 1 and 2 is “no”.

I think it’s important to note that Apple does not plan to bundle the Game Porting Toolkit with MacOS 14 Sonoma. It needs to be installed and in fact will work under Ventura. The installation process is similar to the installation process for installing one of the free open-source versions of WINE; that is, no biggy for some people but for a typical end user who just wants to play games it is probably a bridge too far. “The Terminal” might as well be “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” for most Mac users who’d just like to fire up a Windows game now and then. Crossover is the best solution for most such folks – for me, too, most of the time!

John M. Hammer wrote:

I think it’s important to note that Apple does not plan to bundle the Game Porting Toolkit with MacOS 14 Sonoma. It needs to be installed and in fact will work under Ventura. The installation process is similar to the installation process for installing one of the free open-source versions of WINE; that is, no biggy for some people but for a typical end user who just wants to play games it is probably a bridge too far. “The Terminal” might as well be “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” for most Mac users who’d just like to fire up a Windows game now and then. Crossover is the best solution for most such folks – for me, too, most of the time!

For me, gaming wise, I can't run anything I play. If Apple improves this, I'd be very happy to run via terminal.

Apple hasn't denied using parts of Crossover wine to create the Game Porting Kit. But, the part of APK that makes it so much better than Crossover or WineSkin or anything wine related on Mac at this point is not the wine part, it's the Direct3D to Metal translation... which is not open source.
Also for me it's different than Bob, all my games play with Apple Porting Kit, and they do play better. For example, everyone knows the problem that Witcher 3 has with DXVK and invisible faces, characters, etc. Well, with APK everything appears perfectly, no more problems., I'm seeing textures and creatures I haven't seen before! I can play the DX11 and the DX12 version with 50 plus fps on my Macbook Air M2.

I don't know if Apple plans to license it, but if it does I would be very happy to own Crossover with a proper D3D to metal translation. Apple had done in a week what MoltenVK and DXVK tries to do for Macs for years...

Apple engineer Gokhan Avkarogullari said ”We built a dxil to metallib converter and directx11 and directx12 to Metal runtime translator. Non graphics APIs are translated by Wine. But we don’t use any tech from moltenVK or DXVK or spirv-cross etc. The shader converter can be shipped by games and can be used in the game developer asset pipelines.”

Stefanos Dardanos wrote:

Apple hasn't denied using parts of Crossover wine to create the Game Porting Kit. But, the part of APK that makes it so much better than Crossover or WineSkin or anything wine related on Mac at this point is not the wine part, it's the Direct3D to Metal translation... which is not open source.
Also for me it's different than Bob, all my games play with Apple Porting Kit, and they do play better. For example, everyone knows the problem that Witcher 3 has with DXVK and invisible faces, characters, etc. Well, with APK everything appears perfectly, no more problems., I'm seeing textures and creatures I haven't seen before! I can play the DX11 and the DX12 version with 50 plus fps on my Macbook Air M2.

I don't know if Apple plans to license it, but if it does I would be very happy to own Crossover with a proper D3D to metal translation. Apple had done in a week what MoltenVK and DXVK tries to do for Macs for years...

Sorry I was too vague, I can't run a single game on Crossover. I really want to try the porting kit.

...

Bob Warren wrote:

Sorry I was too vague, I can't run a single game on Crossover. I really want to try the porting kit.

How is that? Which games are you trying to run unsuccessfully?
You are either trying to run games that are not currently supported (dx12?) or have a third party anticheat software of some sort, otherwise Crossover is the easiest way to run any game without any knowledge of wine, emulation, translation, terminals or whatever.

Apple Porting kit is just a developer tool that may or may not improve over time, on the contrary Crossover do improves hand by hand with Wine.

Israel wrote:

Bob Warren wrote:

Sorry I was too vague, I can't run a single game on Crossover. I really want to try the porting kit.

How is that? Which games are you trying to run unsuccessfully?
You are either trying to run games that are not currently supported (dx12?) or have a third party anticheat software of some sort, otherwise Crossover is the easiest way to run any game without any knowledge of wine, emulation, translation, terminals or whatever.

Apple Porting kit is just a developer tool that may or may not improve over time, on the contrary Crossover do improves hand by hand with Wine.

I'm very experienced with Wine and developer tools. The Games I've tried are not DX12 games. Every single game either fails to launch, does launch and performs so poorly it's unplayable, crashes repeatably, is completely unstable version to version, etc. Sorry but it's not the easiest or most stable way to run games. I'm not suggesting the development here is not worth it nor anyone here is not contributing. I'm a continues subscriber because I want this team to have the ability to keep pushing the development forward. I know full well everyone is benefiting (Apple, Valve, opensource Wine team.) This team is the main reason anything can run properly.

Now that said, IMHO, Crossover's software design is the issue here. Valve tunes each Proton release even by the game. They have multiple releases and probably tons of patches they use to make stuff run so well. Apple's GPK will likely build something compile-time to do similar.

Anyway, keep being awesome Crossover, it's not unnoticed.

In answering your questions, it is important to note that my knowledge ends in September 2021, and I have no information about recent developments or partnerships between Codeweavers and Apple. However, I can provide some general information regarding game porting and Apple initiatives. While I can't speak specifically about Codeweavers' involvement with Apple, collaboration between software developers and Apple is not uncommon. It's possible that Codeweavers collaborated with Apple on the Game Porting Toolkit, but official confirmation or details will have to come from the companies themselves. It's interesting to see reviews of https://casinosanalyzer.ca/online-casinos/new-casinos for different games, by the way. As for using Apple's DX12 code paths in future Crossover releases, that will depend on the collaboration between Codeweavers and Apple, as well as any licensing or technical considerations. The decision to include Apple's DX12 support in Crossover will ultimately be made by the Codeweavers team.

Imagine the possibilities if apple open sourced dxmetal and codeweavers could use it for next crossover release , it would be huge but alas apple did it this way :/ . I also get their pov though games do run so much better natively , mostly bc of translation of arm to x86_64 which is why proton translation on a steam deck runs like native or sometimes even better