CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hello code weavers,

I'm using the trial now to test some 32 bit games. Specifically, I'm attempting to run Day of Defeat 1.6 and Day of Defeat Source. Both through Steam. The performance is poor for both. For 1.6, I average around 25 FPS. For Source, I can turn down all graphics settings and achieve a higher average frame rate. However, I see large transient dips.

Is this about the performance I can expect, or are there performance improvements on the way?

Hey Phillip! I haven’t tested these games myself but I have tested half life and half life 2 and they run perfectly on my system. I’m not with codeweavers, just a friendly face :). I’ve tested on the M1 Max chip myself!

Also, do you have the directx for modern games installed on your steam bottled and have you enabled vulkan via the setting when right clicking on your steam bottle?

This is a known issue and related to the fact the MacOS is now 64bit only. There’s a Codeweavers article on the matter and how they managed to enable 32bit support for the newer Mac OS’s. For me Mirrors Edge suffers while performing well on Parrallels. Half Life 2 is ok and but should perform better. They have said it will be worked but no timeline.

Charlie Giordano wrote:

Also, do you have the directx for modern games installed on your
steam bottled and have you enabled vulkan via the setting when right
clicking on your steam bottle?

I have done nothing aside from install CrossOver, Steam, then the games themselves from within Steam. Can you point to some resources that describe this process?

Brynmor Thompson wrote:

There’s a Codeweavers article on the matter and how they managed
to enable 32bit support for the newer Mac OS’s.

Can you point me to this article?

Many thanks!

https://youtu.be/nVxzCteaWnc

I followed this tutorial here. Dude explains it really well! Just go ahead and skip over to the part where he does crossover. He’s labeled every part of his video. Let us know if it works!

There's another thread here about this issue:

https://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/general/?t=27;msg=250669

As others have said, it's a known issue that 32-bit game performance is very poor in CrossOver, stemming originally from M1/Rosetta2 having no 32-bit support. From what I have gathered, the 32-bit support that CrossOver devs have managed to put together is fairly hacky. Wine still does not officially support 32-bit programs on M1, so whatever CrossOver has done to support it I'm guessing is somewhat experimental.

I am anxious to hear from CodeWeavers if they plan to address 32-bit performance. I've also been watching the Wine development branches to see when 32-bit support is likely to come to Wine itself, but I haven't seen much to get excited about yet.

I have also had poor performance with 32 bit apps on my M1. Half Life 2 struggles due to CPU limitations which is quite disappointing. Hopefully codeweavers can continue to work on poor performance, or, less likely, Valve will update HL2 to a 64 bit architecture. But that's HIGHLY unlikely given Valve's history.

This is the blog post mentioned above:
Release of CrossOver 19

It is sort of a hack. They run 32-Bit code in a 64-Bit process, so they can call 64-Bit system APIs. In the blog post they mention that the performance hit wouldn't be too bad, but now we've seen that unfortunately this isn't true for all software. I experience the same issues with a wide variety of games that used to work previously.

Edit: Also, this was pre-M1 so the problem didn't manifest itself so much on Intel.

Thanks all. Comments much appreciated.

I'll check out the video that Charlie posted and report back.

Unfortunately, 32-bit Windows application support is the ONLY reason I would purchase CrossOver. I hope performance improves!

Yeah. I don’t think that video will do any good, I felt the same as you. I like the translation layer approach. The cheap version of Parallels will see you good though if you really want to run 32 bit stuff well. This is not exclusive to the M1

Couldn’t find the article that broke down the challenge but mention of it here. https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrating-the-difficult-the-release-of-crossover-19

It’s really interesting how some of these HL source games work. I’ve been testing day of defeat and it freezes on sending client info and takes the game off of full screen. HL2 runs perfectly just as HL1, TF2 gave me issues to the point I’m just using my GeForce now subscription to play the game. Gonna test the left 4 dead series because I have a thought that it may just be multiplayer games giving really bad issues. I’ve noticed that all of this wine overlaying (32 but on 64) is using a ton of RAM, especially on multiplayer games.

I’m working with an M1 Max 10/32 with 32 GB of RAM. Gonna update if L4D series works or not

Update - yea it’s not working. Tried running multiplayer and single player of the L4D series and they just refuse to open a game. Even if all my settings are turned low. Luckily for me, I was really only interested in the single player games of mine that are 32 bit, but these multiplayer games are something else

Unfortunately the suggestions from that video didn't improve performance.

Any other suggestions are welcome, otherwise, seems I'm out of luck.

Thanks all!

The best way to run 32-bit games at the moment is definitely through Parallels. Performance will be satisfactory for most 32-bit games.

Be wary though, Parallels comes with a host of drawbacks- no way to make an app properly fullscreen; keyboard throughput and latency is sometimes poor (I play racing games which often involve holding down 4+ keys, which makes Parallels stroke out and stop responding to keyboard input properly), a predatory pricing model (you have to pay through the nose for a version that makes full use of your computing resources, and the one-time-purchase is a complete scam). Here's to hoping CrossOver comes through with something better!