> Apple hid something AMAZING for Mac gaming at WWDC: a full Windows DirectX 12 gaming emulator.
Windows ... emulator? Does this mean we can now play old Windows EXE games? E.g. can I now run Fallout 2 and 3 like I did on an old Intel Mac with Crossover?
Can it also run Windows apps which don't use DirectX? I need some for work and have to use Parallels now.
Does it support Windows crypto APIs (certificates etc)?
It's Wine with some special sauce (Apple couldn't reuse VKD3D because they chose to invent Metal rather than stick with OpenGL/Vulkan so they had to build their graphics translation themselves). Crossover is built on the same technology. In fact, Apple's brew script literally links to Crossover's sources: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apple/homebrew-apple/main/...
Apple's version of Wine is aimed at developers, though. It shouldn't take too long for someone to make an app or script to easily set up environments with the developer runtime, but I doubt they'll support it as well as Valve supports Proton. If your application of choice doesn't need any fancy graphics, there's a decent chance Wine/Crossover can already run it anyway, no need to mess with Apple's SDK.
With the M2 Max outputting 28fps at 1080p (screenshot linked), I wouldn't expect too much from the gaming performance of this thing, though.
OpenGL was a technological dead-end and Vulkan came 2 years after Metal, which as stated, came about because OpenGL was a technological dead-end. Besides, mobile gaming with Metal has been reasonably successful, whichever way you slice it.
Vulkan born out of Mantle which was released before Metal. Of course, Mantle wasn't openly developed in the beginning, but AMD and Apple were still partners in the GPU space back then. I don't see why Apple and AMD wouldn't cooperate in this space. Mantle would've been a much bigger success outside of the console market if iOS also used it, and Apple could have helped shape Mantle if they got in at the ground floor.
I know Apple isn't exactly a company that's open to adopting other people's standard when they might as well develop their own, but the split from the other API standards was still a choice they made.
I never thought Wine/Crossover can work on M2. Isn't the M2 CPU totally different from what ordinary Windows apps are meant to be ran on? I know there there is an Arm Windows version and apps built for it but there aren't many.
macOS runs x64 executables just fine through Rosetta so I don't see why Wine couldn't make use of that hardware acceleration.
It's also possible to only simulate the entrypoints through Rosetta and then execute native aarch64 code from there. On Linux https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64 does exactly that, for example. However, with the performance Apple has been able to squeeze out of Rosetta, I'm not sure of that workaround is even necessary.
Windows ... emulator? Does this mean we can now play old Windows EXE games? E.g. can I now run Fallout 2 and 3 like I did on an old Intel Mac with Crossover?
Can it also run Windows apps which don't use DirectX? I need some for work and have to use Parallels now.
Does it support Windows crypto APIs (certificates etc)?