Windows clients on Mac

[Business Cat]

Just wondering if there's a way to run Steam games that are solely Windows on my Mac. I know there's software for it like Wine, PlayOnMac, PortingKit, etc - but will it even download if it's not the right OS?

[Omega]

WINE is on the only way to run Windows Steam on MAC OS. Yes you can download the Windows Client via the browser just like you do normally. Many Windows games will not run properly or not at all and the performance will be lacking.

PlayonMAC is a tool to easily use and configure WINE. This is what you should use if you want to try this.


If you really want to use a MAC for gaming you will be better off putting Linux on it, the Linux Steam client has a modified version of WINE called Proton and various other tools build-in to run Windows games. Gaming performance on Linux through Proton will be significantly better then on MAC OS though WINE, since Proton has various tools which translate DirectX to Vulkan, WINE on MAC has to use poor replacements for Direct3D developed by WINE instead.

[Business Cat]

For Linux - should I try to dual boot or would it be easier to use a VM?

[Omega]

Publicado originalmente por Business Cat:

For Linux - should I try to dual boot or would it be easier to use a VM?

Virtualbox VM? You can't game in Virtualbox because the virtual graphics adapter doesn't support Vulkan and even if it did the VM's performance will be absolutely horrible, Virtualbox doesn't do well in intensive workloads. And Virtualbox's OpenGL support is horrible also. Running the games in OpenGL (Which is what I would assume WINE/Proton is using by default) instead will cause issues with many of them and it would destroy the performance even more.

It has to be a dual boot.

[C2Dan88]

Or install Windows via bootcamp?