If you are one of those people who have a Mac and want to play PC games, surely you already know how complex it is for some of these games to run on your computer. And is this there are gaming technologies that just aren’t designed to work on Apple devices.
Today we are getting a little closer to the barrier, at least in games using DirectX 12. The CodeWeavers team, creators of the Proton layer for Valve, have worked to bring Microsoft technology to the teams at the Cupertino company.
DirectX 12 on Mac becomes possible, but several challenges remain
CodeWavers are not a newbie team, they decided to create DXVK, which is basically software that translates calls to DirectX so that Vulcan can read them. This team has been building Wine desed solutions for over 20 years, so they know what they’re doing.
As I said, his new goal is to bring DirectX 12 a Mac, corn this challenge is great and it will take time must be completed. As they say, the biggest challenge lies in the SoC of Apple devices.
In general, metal tessels differently and lacks geometry shaders and transform feedback. There is a problem with the resource limits. In general, games should have access to at least one million Shader Resource Views (SRVs). Access to so many SRVs requires a level 2 resource binding. Metal only supports about 500,000 resources per argument buffer, so it is not possible to bind level 2 resources. half a million metal is sufficient for indexing the Vulkan descriptor, but not for D3D12. This limitation means that CrossOver Mac cannot support Layer 2 linkage, and therefore many DirectX 12 games will not work.
However, despite the issues they face, CodeWavers is optimistic about overcoming this challenge and calls us to their next 23 build to see the progress.
