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The state of DX11 support on MacOS

Feb 08 2018 05:40 PM | dankoB in News

Wine + MoltenVK + Metal2 may one day allow Windows only, DirectX11 games to be ported through Wine.

Wineskin depends on Wine which is what is used to translate the Windows Direct X graphics code to OpenGL. Mac relies on this for Wine to work correctly on the operating system. Mac's current OpenGL version sits at variance depending on what year your system was manufactured. Apple provides a list here:

https://support.appl.../en-ca/HT202823

The problem right now is that, Linux, as an open source platform has many people working on implementing the newer version of the OpenGL driver into the OSs so the developers at Wine actually have something to work with. A few years back Apple decided to drop OpenGL implementation to MacOS and apply their own proprietary graphics API - Metal, or currently known as Metal 2

These are the systems that support Metal 2:

https://support.appl.../en-ca/HT205073

DX10 and DX11 games require an OpenGL version of 4.5 and higher. These will likely never run on Mac systems unless Apple provides the Metal 2 source code for developers to work with or they allow non signed OpenGL drivers above 4.1 to work on MacOS. Both of which never happen as it is contrary to Apple's business policy.

ScoPezz, on 24 January 2018 - 01:13 AM, said:

I just read your post and while everything there is true, "never" is a strong word. Something I hope gets traction is MoltenVK (or something similar if there is ever such a thing). MoltenVK translates Vulkan calls into Metal calls. That would already enable a lot of modern games on macOS. Secondly, there are projects like DXVK (Direct3D 11 to Vulkan) and VK9 (Direct3D 9 to Vulkan) that could hypothetically be combined with MoltenVK to run Direct3D11 games on macOS.
But while VK9 and DXVK are open source and are making amazing progress, MoltenVK has been silent for a long while and isn't open source.

That being said, Metal was kind of a double edged sword, but given that Apple (still) has a lot of influence in the IT industry, game and engine developers have actually started releasing more stuff with Metal support. Unreal Engine, Unity and the WoW engine already have support for it. So who knows what can happen

EDIT: Seems I was wrong about MoltenVK progress, their newest version was released on 2017/11/06.

Wine - https://www.winehq.org/
OpenGL - https://www.opengl.org/
Metal2 - https://developer.apple.com/metal/
Vulkan - https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/
MoltenVK - https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/

In recent news, the pot is being brewed....here's hoping this idea comes to fruition

https://github.com/r...vulkan/issues/8

*this article is was put together from two separate posts from different threads.

10 Comments

syto203
Feb 17 2018 11:39 PM

really hope this works/releases and not just die out

dankoB
Feb 27 2018 01:49 PM

Some really great news just popped up in the forums...thanks ovvldc!

https://arstechnica....hanks-to-apple/

yifymovies.org
Mar 28 2018 10:16 PM

good info thank you

Liutenant_frank_francis
Apr 03 2018 10:56 AM

So with all these Vulkan and Metal things, I assume that in future there might be a possibility of porting Games with DX11?

dankoB
Apr 09 2018 02:35 PM

Yes, so long as Apple doesn't make it tough on the Wine developers that are trying to make MolenVK (now open sourced) and Metal2 (proprietarily locked) work together in unison.

Brainzyy
Apr 09 2018 03:40 PM

dankoB, on 09 April 2018 - 02:35 PM, said:

Yes, so long as Apple doesn't make it tough on the Wine developers that are trying to make MolenVK (now open sourced) and Metal2 (proprietarily locked) work together in unison.

Wine developers will actually not have to depend on Apple for once

Wine would just have to add support for MoltenVK (since Vulkan support is already in Wine now). The developers that could have problems with Apple are the MoltenVK developers (Since they are the people that are actually using Metal).