I don't think something like Proton will pan out. What will likely happen is that the larger studio making AAA games will want an iOS port. At that point, it will be trivial to tweak it for the M1 chips. Games like Elden Ring and and GTA are perfectly playable on an iPad with a controller. M1 Apple TVs are definitely in the pipeline. iOS makes it worthwhile for AAA studios to port their hits over to the Apple ecosystem.

It exists as a proprietary product. Final Fantasy 14's Mac "port" is using Crossover, which slaps some magic on Wine. Definitely not a AAA graphics title but you could run it today. On a 16" MBP with the top spec M1 Max, it will get about 30-50fps with medium detail and I think I tested it at 1680x1050 - which feels like a miracle, almost, but gets trounced by an Intel i9 + AMD Vega 56(?) MBP running Windows from a few years ago. If the right APIs were available and an aarch64 binary were published instead, it would probably be a different story.

Doing some quick searching around.

I know there is Crossover, Wine technically works on Mac from what I can tell also. So not sure if there is a technical reason Proton couldn't work on Mac other than just not building it.

Apple does talk a lot about gaming now on the iPhone and iPad, I would love to see them talk about it more on Mac (especially with how powerful these are) and maybe work with Proton like Steam is for the Steam Deck.

Proton also depends on DXVK, an additional translation layer that specifically bridges the Windows graphics APIs to Vulkan (as opposed to WINE handling its system calls in a general sense).

Meanwhile, newer versions of macOS (and the M1 that runs the ARM builds in particular) don't use Vulkan at all, opting for Metal instead.

Crossover is proprietary. Pure Wine cannot run x86 apps on ARM if I understand correctly.

It can't, but if you use Linux and binfmt_misc, you can set it up so that x86 Windows apps run seamlessly on ARM.

Well crazy mac hardware is actually not very good compared to PC graphic cards.

The comparison chart for the high spec M1 Ultra was using a 3090.

So even if it "only" reaches 3060 levels of performance in games, I think many people would be okay with that. Reality will likely place it somewhere between a 3060 and the 3090.

It's their perf per watt chart that is irrelevant for gaming.

Honestly, performance per watt is probably the least important consideration for a desktop computer.

Running a farm of these things? Maybe perf per watt makes sense to save some money. Mobile device running on battery? I totally get it.

But surely, the difference in cost for one person running it in their house, or a few hundred people in an office... like who cares? The cost savings won't even be noticeable on the power bill.

Performance per watt is also a good indicator of noise levels.

So 3090 price for 3060 performance, doesn't sound very promising. I wish we could exploit those gpus easier for compute, but compute with metal is simply not there, at least for now.

It's not priced like a 3090 though? There's an entire computer there and the CPU performance is no slouch, even if the GPU may be lacking for what gamers want today.

I'm pretty sure the gamers who're always rocking high-end video cards are a small minority of PC gamers, anyway, even if we only count "serious" gamers (not just Candy Crush or whatever) to remove that potential objection.

A lot more probably find a best-bang-for-the-buck midrange card and hang on to it for ~3 years, before upgrading to another midrange card.

You're right, it's priced higher than RTX3090. Because HP sells the whole system with RTX3090 at $2909 right now.

Actually, they're excellent as one can actually easily purchase an M1 mac at the moment.

What's the M1 Max equivalent to? Roughly a RTX3070 or thereabouts? That doesn't seem too awful.

At almost twice the price of a desktop with the same RTX3070 from Dell or HP.

It's definitely a great machine, but if you're a gamer - stay away.

I would like to see better gaming on Mac just so I wouldn't need two computers, or compromise just to get a machine that can be a halfway decent gaming setup.

Guess that means consoles will always have a place as that "second computer".

GeForce Now is there for you...

Unless you want more or replace it.

Some more donations to Proton’s Patreon would probably help. They only get about $400 / month right now…

https://www.patreon.com/protondb

That is a Patreon link ProtonDB, not Proton. Proton is funded by Valve and ProtonDB is unaffiliated.

You’re right, thanks for pointing that out.