Among everything else, it’s kinda cool that we’re inching ever closer to a world operating systems don’t really matter any more. I mean, sure, this is literally running a virtual OS inside macOS, but I feel that it’s only a matter of time before that VM layer isn’t necessary, and that software will run on whatever hardware you have, as long as the hardware is up to the task.
I mean, all computers are Turing complete von Neumann machines. Any software can run on any computer, and run well on a reasonably powerful computer. The only reason it doesn’t is because of greedy corporations.
Does anyone here understand the benefits of running this SteamOS VM over a more direct translation using Crossover or Whisky?
I’ve had this on my M2 Air for a few days now, and done a bit of messing about.
From my somewhat amateur perspective, while it’s cool that I can boot up SteamOS, Crossover + NotProton + macOS Steam has proven to be more useful.
While I could never hope to actually play it in any useful way, I can get Horizon Forbidden West to launch with Crossover. It’s 15fps on low settings while standing still, but it launches. In SteamOS I can’t even get it to launch. Alan Wake Remastered runs very well using Crossover, while the original Alan Wake does run, but has an unplayable amount of frame lag. In SteamOS, AW Remastered won’t launch at all, while AW OG runs really well. Also, the original Talos Principle ran really nicely under SteamOS. I’ve not yet tried it using Crossover, but I’ve no reason to believe it won’t also run well.
So at the moment my view is that FX Steam Launcher is very cool, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it, but it’s very much at beta level.
Thanks for posting your experiences with it. I get the impression that while its a cool thing to be able to do, it’s not really a compatibility or usability breakthrough. As in, it won’t fundamentally improve translation performance.
I feel that this has to be much slower. VMs add a layer of complexity, where it then still has to translate Windows/DirectX/x86. Crossover is doing that already, though I think it has to go to Vulkan before metal. Maybe I’ll give this a try on my macbook later today to compare the performance.
So it runs on a Mac that costs twice as much as a perfectly capable gaming PC. Congrats.
I’d be curious to see how it runs on a base M1 or M2. I wonder if it will run on those or if it’s just M4 (note: M4 added ray tracing, so it was an attractive target for hobbyist gamers, and its launch was when Cyberpunk was released on macOS).
I have a base M2 MacBook Air (16GB RAM/1TB SSD), I’m sure I could spare a couple hundred GB of space for a SteamOS partition. But I wonder what kinds of games would actually run. M2 is very capable (I think my machine is roughly equivalent to a 12th gen Intel i3, but with a better iGPU, though let’s be real, an iGPU isn’t gonna rival a dedicated one… I had a Radeon 280 with 3GB of VRAM in my last PC, and it benched better than both my Macs (M2 base, and M2 Pro for the desktop). Even though “technically” the M2/M2 Pro GPU can tap into any of that 16GB RAM that the system isn’t using. Still got smoked by the 280, and it wasn’t close. The only way the Macs won was on CPU against my 4th-gen Xeon. But, duh. And even then, the Apple chips didn’t “smoke” the Xeon. Xeon is good shit. There’s a reason Intel Mac Pros used Xeons. If I were building today, I would really want to use a Xeon again, but AMD is kicking Intel’s arse on value these days, and there are some great AMD chips. I just don’t know what model numbers and whatnot.
Sure, but if that’s the only hardware you have available then you wouldn’t need to buy another “perfectly capable gaming PC” to play because games would just work on the Mac too.
I’ve just installed it on my own M2 Air (16gb/512). So far it’s cool to be able to run SteamOS as a Linux VM, but the one game I’ve tried (so far) - The Talos Principle - just crashed Steam.
My testing continues…
The M2 air is more equivalent to a 12th Gen. i7 u or i5 H their CPU. My M1 MBP smokes my 12th gen i7 ThinkPad after the throttling has set in. A well cooled one at that. I3 laptops notoriously have shit cooling and even the passively cooled M2 will absolutely crush them once throttling has set in.
Some games run extremely well through translation layers, others done. It kinda depends on what instructions are needed. But as the other person said. If it’s what ya got then run what ya brung.
