- 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 Macs.
Who'd 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?
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Our setup, which Emily is just putting the finishing touches
on right now, is an M1 Ultra Mac Studio
with 128 gigs of unified memory.
We're running Mac OS Sonoma
which works best with the Game Porting Toolkit right now.
And we actually need to use two versions of Steam.
The Mac native one and the Windows one, 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 gonna 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 gonna try some games.
Cyberpunk-e.
- Cyberpunk-y.
- Yeah, Cyberpunk.
- [Emily] Hey
- Hey, whoa, 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've been more easy if the gooey method worked
but it should be much easier in the future.
- Instructions say adjust graphic settings
and resolution and see what happens to frame rate.
I see.
- [Emily] 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 on 11 FPS.
It does not look great.
- Well, I mean it looks okay as long
as you only look at like still frames.
- Uh-huh, yeah, the still frames don't look great.
- Well, you're at 720P.
You could boost the resolution.
- 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
and or 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 weavers crossover flavor of wine
with what appears to be the DXVK translation layer
for direct X9 through 11.
And then Apple's own homespun D3D metal translation wrapper
for direct X12, which isn't without controversy.
The 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.
- I wanna play Civ, oh.
Fine, how about Hollow Night?
- [Emily] 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 other than that, it feels fine.
- [Emily] 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 lag.
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.
- [Emily] 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 layer 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, but of course,
it's not really intended to be.
Let's go F1, let's go.
Oh, 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 freaking way that Halo Infinite runs.
- I mean, you're not currently running Halo Infinite,
you're running-
- I'm not running Halo Infinite
'cause I don't think that's gonna 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.
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.
Q2 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 example, anti cheat,
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 cheat but it almost certainly isn't helping.
But you told me there was an anti cheat 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 anti cheat.
So the idea behind it though is that instead of
doing anything special,
what you do is you rename the anti cheat executable
'cause it starts up and then scans things.
- Yeah.
- And then it launches the game.
You rename that executable, then you rename
the games executable to that executables 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 it depends on how you play the game.
- [David] In Elden Ring, you need online.
- You do?
- [David] There's actually quite a bit of multiplayer
in Elden 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.
- [Emily] 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 blobs.
- 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 rose?
- No.
- [Emily] 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.
- [Emily] I guess it needed to warm up the shaders.
- Interesting, 30 FPS Elden Ring.
I mean at what resolution though?
1080p, maximum.
And we got those results with the GPU
at 20% and before even hydrating with this water bottle
from lttstore.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 ChatGPT,
I mean Game Porting Toolkit, but it works with Proton.
And given its anti cheat 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 AVX two 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 Marovitz,
the person who posted the infamous video running
Cyberpunk on a Mac, modified his Whisky 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 gonna 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 Carmack and Gabe Newell
of Valve claimed that Apple kept coming
to them talking about supporting games
but just nothing would ever come of it.
And so far, no major developers that I could find
have publicly expressed support besides Hideo Kojima,
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 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.
- [Emily] And it looks like weird camera bug aside,
it looks like it's a lot smoother.
- [Emily] Oh, yeah, the performance is way better.
- Like even if it's just 60 versus 60,
the frame pacing is a lot better.
- [Linus] Yeah.
- [Emily] Right here, you can tell.
- Much better and the latency is markedly better as well.
Okay, I'm gonna win this fight this time though.
- [Emily] Oh, come on, we have more stuff to shoot today.
- 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 ha.
- Ha ha, 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,
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,
gonna be necessary for a good experience.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
why not check out our gaming on Linux challenge series?
Maybe someday I'll be revisiting it with a Mac.
I wouldn't hold my breath though.