Steam play + Proton on macOS

[Nummy]

As title suggest, can we get steam play with proton for macOS as well? I would love to buy and play more windows games on my mac, but mostly I'm too lazy to boot up windows thorugh bootcamp. Also windows make me sick, so I avoid it as much as I can. But I would use that functionality to run games on macOS without hassle and natively from steam.
Thanks!

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Theoreticall ou couldld use MoltenVK on MacOS for Proton so you'd be using Metal

Honestly the main issue iwh Macs is the fact that they've stopped shipping AMD and Nvdia cards on huge swaths of their computers/laptops Making the main issue that you're efectively emulating so youc an run a Windows game on a terible Intel GPU

Unfortunately that doesn't cover support for DirectX10 and below as Proton still uses OpenGL for those, not to mention games that use native OpenGL.

[Nummy]

Originally posted by "Bro-Force"-BROntosaurus:

Originally posted by Nummy:

If they managed to make steam play for linux, they can do it for macOS as well. It is not so hard to get game working thorugh wine, main problem is having game working with steam or run it from steam. That is a main problem for us.

Not really. You run game from steam. For Valve, it's just matter of getting game to play on wine. Steam in native environment is... Native environment.

If you can't link your game with steam via libraries, then you won't be able to run it. Majority of games on steam has this protection in them. You can't just copy game out of your steam, put it into wine and then run wine executable on other OS via steam. Don't go.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Nummy:

Originally posted by "Bro-Force"-BROntosaurus:

Not really. You run game from steam. For Valve, it's just matter of getting game to play on wine. Steam in native environment is... Native environment.

If you can't link your game with steam via libraries, then you won't be able to run it. Majority of games on steam has this protection in them. You can't just copy game out of your steam, put it into wine and then run wine executable on other OS via steam. Don't go.

You can run the Windows version of Steam under Wine. The webhelper (needed for the web browser and new chat) will crash due to a bug in Wine but the main client will still work.

[wuddih]

you can compile proton for mac, the git has the instructions for it.
just the implementation in Steam is currently for linux only, i've not looked into it yet how the procedure for that is but if it is not more then Steam dropping some parameters to proton ... then it will work closely the same on mac or anything proton runs on.

it is named "compatibility tool" not "make stuff run on linux tool". mac will surely follow with more official support. linux just has more priority right now as this will be probably the recommended alternative for stubborn xp/vista users.

[aiusepsi]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Unfortunately that doesn't cover support for DirectX10 and below as Proton still uses OpenGL for those, not to mention games that use native OpenGL.

OpenGL does still work on macOS; Apple have announced that OpenGL is formally deprecated as of 10.14 Mojave, but they haven't announced a timeline to remove it, or even confirmed that this does mean they're definitely planning to remove it.

Yes, if you're developing something new for Mac you should definitely use Metal instead of OpenGL (mostly because the perf is going to be better, as much as the possible threat of OpenGL going away) but acting like OpenGL is already gone from Mac is nuts; if you already have software which uses OpenGL, it still works.

[sarmadka]

Technically this is doable, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon. Valve seems to be doing this in preparation for another push to Steam Machines, which run Linux. Mac doesn't support Vulkan so running Windows games on Mac means translating DX -> Vulkan -> Metal, which means it will be even harder to get the games running well on Mac, add to that the fact that you can't find powerful enough Macs and that makes the whole effort less fruitful.

[NMA]

I have star the Proton source code on Github. The readme file said Proton can be compiled on mac os. I have updated my steam client does not find the place to turn on Proton, maybe they have not put Proton into steam client :)

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_3.7/README.md

[Nummy]

So this is not something impossible.
What we need for macOS is some tool, that can pack up games inside wine wrapper and set it up all for us and game can be run directly from steam natively. It can use ordinary drivers and everything as we would pack game into wine ourselves. Nothing fancy here to be made. Because problem with running steam inside wine is mostly steam (piracy protection,...).

[BNO]

I don't know what the talk regarding Vulkan not being supported on Mac is, because Khronos and Valve as one of its members has announced support in February of this year:
https://www.khronos.org/news/press/vulkan-applications-enabled-on-apple-platforms

And MoltenVK is already supported running Metal via Vulkan, see here:
https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/portability-initiative

Apple will not deactivate OpenGL on macOS, they will just not invest in it anymore. There is to much Mac software that relies on OpenGL as the operating systems themselves did rely heavily on OpenGL in the past. A good article on this can be found here: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/28/why-macos-mojave-requires-metal----and-deprecates-opengl
Probably we'll see OpenGL go away in macOS 10.15 at the earliest, more likely is a later release, because Apple knows how to handle transition periods.

Valve is the primary sponsor of the Vulkan cross-platform SDK that also includes Android and iOS support. So I presume that Valve will first work on getting the Linux version of Proton working, because if this works properly it can bring more gain to Valve than the Mac version.