YouTuber ETA Prime has tested PC games on an Apple MacBook Pro with the Apple M4 Max. This was made possible thanks to an ARM64 build of SteamOS running on macOS, courtesy of a new GitHub project titled "FX Steam Launcher".
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.
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.