CodeWeavers is committed to supporting DirectX 12 games on Mac
Perhaps most Mac and Linux users have never heard of CodeWeavers, but they may also benefit from the work of CodeWeavers. As a company established in 1996, CodeWeavers is the main sponsor of the Wine project and has long been committed to making Windows applications run on Linux, Mac, and ChromeOS. CodeWeavers has also signed a contract with Valve to help the latter’s Proton project, providing assistance for the Steam platform and running Linux games.
CodeWeavers has a commercial software called CrossOver, which is aimed at ordinary consumers and has the same function as Proton. It can be used for Linux and Mac, but it adopts a more comprehensive approach, rather than purely game-centric. Recently, CodeWeavers said that achieving compatibility with DirectX 12 in CrossOver is the top priority next year. According to CodeWeavers, due to the maturity of Vulkan as an API and the improvement of VKD3D, DirectX 12 will run in Linux in the next full version. However, running on macOS has encountered greater obstacles and challenges. The problem is that Apple’s support for APIs in its display drivers and operating systems is relatively poor. Compared with cross-platform technologies such as Vulkan, the Metal bottom layer has only half the upper limit of the shader resource view (SRV) that DirectX 12 can call, and the old version of OpenGL supported by Apple is not suitable for DirectX 12 converters.
Because Apple is unwilling to add support for virtual addresses or similar Vulkan extensions, the required method is quite different from that on the Windows platform, which hinders the work of the translation layer. Many game developers have to spend a lot of time optimizing Apple’s hardware to make games run better. This is probably one of the reasons why there are fewer games on macOS.
CodeWeavers said that CrossOver 22 will increase the support of DirectX 12 on Linux, and it will be Mac’s turn when CrossOver 23 is reached, but the exact time is still unclear. This means that Mac products equipped with M-series self-developed chips will be able to support DirectX 12 game masterpieces.
