Proton: Steam Play macOS support

I believe it's in the works. Hell, the first line of the introduction states "Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on Linux and macOS operating systems."

Plus they added MoltenVK to the codebase. So it's clear they intend on supporting macOS at some point.

These kinds of issues are irrelevant, I'm sure the developers already know that a lot of people would like for the macOS to be supported.

I think one of the bigger issues will be the fact that Apple removes 32bit support next year. As far as I know CodeWeavers said they have a plan to work around that but I don't know if there is already some work done. The question is if this workaround is capable of running games.

Also they have some sloppy OpenGL drivers and deprecated them entirely. Since DXVK only supports DX10 and DX11 an "everything else to Vulkan" wrapper is also needed. VK9 works on a D3D9 to Vulkan wrapper. Maybe map everything else (<= DX8) with dgVoodoo2 to DX11? If so the creator of dgVoodoo2 would like some money too I think.

Since Apples removes everything from macOS that WINE relies on it is no surprise that Steam Play support on macOS is a thing that will break over and over again. It depends on CodeWeavers I think.

The biggest hurdle is some incomplete features in moltenvk at the moment. Valve can always include 32bit libraries with steam itself .

I would suggest an Everything -> Vulkan or even -> Metal wrapper anyway, as the OpenGL interfaces are not just deprecated, they're also slower in some cases, and don't support all of the newer features, as Apple's GL cuts off at 4.1. Not to mention, they're only GL Core compatible, and the shader language is essentially limited depending on which GPU is in the system (NVidia/AMD/Intel), so even some software will fail to run due to shader compilation errors or missing GL functions that don't have an equivalent in 4.1 Core.

Actually, that request belongs to steam support / steam community website, not to this repo. Proton does have some compatibility with Mac OS and it is improving, but steam play (that uses proton under the hood) is not enabled on Mac OS. This issue should be closed.

macOS support has been removed from Proton itself: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d8177fa40f3de729e55d238d3c24877

macOS support has been removed from Proton itself: a841204

Is there any official justification for this?

There's an issue up for getting DXVK to work with MoltenVK, this will be 90% of the work required to get Proton working properly on mac.

only point from here the epic issue for DXVK support on moltenVK
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/203

Now moltenVK have tesselation and more stuff so maybe we are closer to archive that than few month ago.

Man, I'm sure this doesn't mean anything -- but I really hope that Mac support is re-considered at some point. Watching my Steam games go from ~230 to ~30 with Catalina was rough. I'll be watching Codeweavers work closely, but it'd be nice for the likes of Valve w/ way more resources to not just totally give up on the platform.

I'm all for the long-overdue boost to Linux gaming (and jealous if it is easier to pull off there given overhead of Apple's whim), but still wish that Mac could be sailing on the same ship. Steam finally hitting Mac was one of the best days on the platform, but its lack of love certainly shows these days and it will be sad if Catalina is pretty much the nail in the coffin for any serious game development.

Please, we need Valve Hammer!!!
The amount of creative people that won't abandon macOS is huge.
Edit: Everybody has something else they want to play or access with Proton. Mine is Hammer.

@rsodre Not the right place for your comment, try ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues.

Codeweavers Managed to get wine to run 32-bit code under 64-bit code on macOS in the new Crossover release (v19)

It would be nice once this gets merged into regular wine if Valve could implement a Proton version that can allow macOS to run 32-bit games again for starters.

Despite no DXVK support, I still see enabling MacOS Catalina users to play 32-bit games again via Steam Play would be a great start.

Relivant Link: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrating-the-difficult-the-release-of-crossover-19

I am not sure if I should make a new issue or where I should post it as I would like to make Valve aware of these new changes.

Even if dxvk is currently not working on mac, but since proton has an option to switch to use OpenGL based wined3d instead of vulkan and mac's opengl should have more common features with dx11 compare to Vulkan (moltenvk), shouldn't macos support be re-enabled?
Does wined3d also not work properly on mac?

@kakashidinho OpenGL is deprecated on macOS and not updated in I think going on 3 years. It's not a long term solution to this problem unfortunately. PC gaming has broadly gone Vulkan, which is why MoltenVK support is so important to this type of effort.

@kakashidinho OpenGL is deprecated on macOS and not updated in I think going on 3 years. It's not a long term solution to this problem unfortunately. PC gaming has broadly gone Vulkan, which is why MoltenVK support is so important to this type of effort.

I understand. However I think moltenvk still has a long way before it can work flawlessly with dxvk. Since some features like geometry shader and transform feedback are missing in metal (witcher3 needs them). I follow moltenvk topic on that and seems like it is very hard to emulate using existing metal features. They have been stuck in that issue for a long time. Hence I am just saying the opengl version might be a workaround solution for now.
Though Mac OpenGL is stuck at version 4.1 and doesn’t have compute shader so it probably also doesn’t work properly for some games.

I'd be willing to pay to have this functionality. Please upvote if you're too

Install Linux on Mac - Win<->Win situation.

I'd be willing to pay to have this functionality. Please upvote if you're too

@RaeesBhatti Maybe tell CodeWeavers. They made paid, proprietary stuff with Wine, and help fund the project.

• https://twitter.com/CodeWeavers
• https://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/general/?;t=27
• https://www.codeweavers.com/about/contact-us

Also consider donating https://www.winehq.org/donate, the issue is still open after all.

Edit: I forgot that Proton is not part of the Wine project! (Although they do send code upstream.) So donating to Wine won't be supporting this issue or the Proton project at all. That said, it still wouldn't hurt do donate to Wine in general! Proton is a fork of Wine and wouldn't exist without it.

I would be surprised if Codeweavers was not already involved in MoltenVK, but +1 for paying for Crossover if you want to meaningfully support WINE related efforts on Mac.

That said - this is Proton by Valve, who at least symbolically has pretty much moved on from Mac as far as one can tell given simply dropping this support and general eighth-hearted status of Steam on the platform (no thanks to Apple I'm sure)

That said - this is Proton by Valve, who at least symbolically has pretty much moved on from Mac as far as one can tell given simply dropping this support and general eighth-hearted status of Steam on the platform (no thanks to Apple I'm sure)

@jeffbax Except this issue is still open. If they had truly completely moved on, this issue would be closed. My understanding is that the main roadblock for this issue to make progress is KhronosGroup/MoltenVK#203 being resolved.

I would suggest people donate to Khronos Group, but the closest they have is membership, which is $1000 for "accredited Academic Institutions" at its cheapest.

Edit: Best thing you can do is go an contribute code directly if you have the skill!

I actually bought the CodeWeavers Crossover license to play Age of Empires 2. Willing to do the same for Proton on Mac.

@RaeesBhatti same, paid for a license the second they released the 64-bit <--> 32-bit bridge. Now more than ever they likely need support if legacy (as well as new) Mac Gaming is going to be feasible at all :(

I actually bought the CodeWeavers Crossover license to play Age of Empires 2. Willing to do the same for Proton on Mac.

@RaeesBhatti If enough people are willing to pay for it, maybe they'll consider to making a CodeWeavers Proton, which will hopefully end up coming upstream.

Drop them a line on Twitter, their macOS forum, or email them if you think it might be worth a shot.

So with the whole virus stuff going on I've been digging around twitter with my free time and I found this comment from CodeWeavers: https://twitter.com/CodeWeavers/status/1237035160983527426?s=20

Not sure what this "little something something" is but it is something to keep a lookout for.

I can vouch that I would also really like to see this. Here’s hoping the Crossover announcement helps!

Two years without built-in macOS support. I'm trying to compile and see how far I can get, but not quite there.

The main issue with Proton support for MacOS is that someone has to make either a DX -> Metal layer or a tool that will take DX -> VK -> Metal (Could be done with DXVK + MoltenVK, but the impression I had was that this method was difficult and not viable).

The other major issue, for me, is that I have a metric ton of games I still play that don't run in Catalina due to the loss of 32-bit application support.

@dhollinger Don't forget that Apple is moving to ARM, so that will make things very difficult.

Not with Universal 2 though.

Considering how long they supported Universal 1, I'm not holding my breath. That said, it is a shame this can't get ported to also work with metal1.2+, that would probably make it easier to port to ARM when it happened, but I have no idea what efforts would be needed to integrate this with metal instead of dx.

I know VMware did make a DX -> Metal layer, but I doubt they're going to open source it.

Native ARM support is not happening as per #1493, so Universal is the only option