Rhedox

DRM is almost never an issue. The problem with BF6 is the anti cheat, not DRM.

This makes me glad I'm using Linux.

DXVK does not run on Mac OS. There's a modified version based on an ancient release of DXVK that kinda works on MoltenVK but the D3D9 side never worked.

The D3D9 implementation in DXVK uses a Vulkan binding model trick to improve performance that MoltenVK can't handle.

Besides that, DXVK simply requires modern Vulkan features that MoltenVK doesn't support.

Rosetta actually supports 32bit code just fine.

It actually works really well. Rosetta is fast enough (together with the incredible single thread performance of Apple CPUs).

There are some pain points that Apple could easily fix:

- Add a barrier API that more closely resembles that of Vulkan, which is easier to use and more flexible than both Metal and D3D12. Microsoft also basically copied the Vulkan barrier API in a D3D12 update but no games use that yet. The regular D3D12 barrier API can be implemented very well on top of the Vulkan barrier model but maps poorly to Metal.

- Open source MetalD3D and/or the Metal shader converter.

- Document the Metal shader bytecode format. It has been reverse engineered and it's mostly just LLVM bitcode anyway. Right now some tools like MoltenVK compile to Metal Shading Language (modified C++) which then gets compiled to Apple Intermediate Representation which then gets compiled to something the GPU can work with.

- Add a bunch of other Metal features like strict robustness guarantees (return 0 for out of bounds reads).

- Support optionally making specific folders in the file system case insensitive. The Linux kernel got support for that for Wine.

- Support the weird Windows NT sync edge cases in the kernel. The Linux kernel also recently got support for that for Wine.

- Add an API to Metal to allow mapping Metal buffers at a specific address in memory to help running 32 bit games.

- Add an optional reduced precision mode for x87 in Rosetta. (Turn the software emulated 80 bit floats into proper 64 bit floats).

One problem for that is that most 32bit games use x87. x87 optionally supports 80 bit floats so Rosetta runs software emulation for x87 math code. That's extremely slow to the point of making even some ancient games unplayable. For example the FMod audio library, which was extremely widespread, uses x87.

Linux x86 emulators work around this by offering an optional reduced precision mode that turns those into either 64 bit or even 32 bit floats. Some even do it by default.

Microsoft also does that with their Prism x86 emulator. They can be somewhat confident in doing that as Microsofts compiler stack has defaulted to configuring the x87 hardware to use 64 bit floats.

Apple should really add that as an option to Rosetta but I doubt that's gonna happen simply because it only impacts 32 bit code.

Apple is ahead on CPU perf. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has a faster GPU than the A17 Pro though.

I don't think that's the case for Android GPU drivers. The kernel driver is just an out of tree kernel module.

Steam Cloud synced save games are nice for people with a Steam Deck.

> hard to beat the performance you get w/ a mac

Unless you need GPU performance. In that case it's very easy to beat the performance of most Macs unless you spend 60% more.

The problem isn't that they're expecting third party clients to pay for API usage.

The problem is that their prices are completely outlandish and multiple orders of magnitude more than they would've made of the same users had they used the official app.

On top of that, the transition period for third party apps to somehow implement a way to make these ridiculous sums of money is 30 days. That's just impossible.

You could've just bought the pro version for a handful of bucks to get rid of the ads...

> This is also a triumph for open source imho because wine is now receiving patches for macOS directly, and it’s a symbiotic relationship that hopefully grows.

I wish. Unfortunately the MetalD3D is proprietary under a very restrictive license. The rest is just Wine code written by Codeweavers.

$3500 to watch movies or use it as a virtual monitor. With 2 hours of battery life.

Tough sell...

> It's not your task to get your software in all the distributions, if your software is useful to people it tends to get pulled in

Not necessarily and that model doesn't scale.