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Comment by samtheprogram | Hacker News Reader

That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.

I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.

The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.

That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.

Proton is a downstream fork of Wine, and upstream Wine already directly supports playing Windows games on Mac using D3DMetal.

You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.

That doesn't change the fact that D3DMetal is closed-source. Wine just links to it.

There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.

Right now, the user experience with Crossover is that you have to manage the whole thing of installing Windows Steam in a Wine bottle, then installing games within that second Steam installation, then dealing with the fact that Steam doesn't seem to like having two instances running on the same computer (my native Steam loses connectivity every time I start the Crossover instance).

Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.

As a comparison, before proton, you could run steam with wine under linux. Wine directx implementation was sufficient to make a quite a few games work just fine, but the experience was atrocious. You either had to install a new instance of steam per game or install everything under one bottle which didn't work well as you had to tweak the install per grame. Personally I used it just for one or two of games that I really wanted to play and could actually run outsisde of steam after installation.

In comparison the proton experience is seamless.

> Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.

Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation.

Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.

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