CrossOver 23.5 has been released for macOS, Linux and Chrome OS.
This release offers an alternate way to run DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games through CrossOver, using components from the Apple game porting toolkit. It can be enabled by toggling on “D3DMetal” in the right bottle sidebar.
The new D3DMetal option improves quality, compatibility, and performance for many games on Macs with the M1 chip or later, including Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077, Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon, Mortal Kombat 1, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, Monster Hunter Rise, God of War and Batman Arkham Knight.
Why? Valve is the number one contributor to the Game Porting Kit.
No CodeWeavers codebase is the foundation of Game Porting Toolkit. Crossover source is referenced all over the notes inside GPTk. CodeWeavers also dropped a press release regarding this exact topic, I’ll link below.
For those that don’t know, CodWeavers is also the company behind creating Proton for Valuve. CodeWeavers is responsible for over two-thirds of all commits to Wine, and the company also employs Wine’s primary maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, as its CTO.
https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-comes-to-macos-apple-s-game-porting-toolkit-powered-by-crossover-source-code
My understanding is that Valve is paying a good bit of money to CodeWeavers to make Proton a thing.
Yes, it’s an investment they obviously benefit from, but if they had wanted to make their investment in a closed source proprietary solution instead, they could have done so. They chose a partnership with CodeWeavers as an open source project that advances gaming as a whole.
Again, yes, they benefit from advancing gaming. But they have the market share and cash reserves where they could have chosen to do so in a way that benefited themselves at the expense of everyone else, and chose to do so in a broadly beneficial way instead. That deserves recognition.
The resources are the #1 reason why this thing exists. Valve wouldn’t have given them if they didn’t stand to benefit from their use. Any decent (or even just mildly-experienced) developer knows that resources are the biggest things you need for any project to be successful. If people aren’t getting paid to make the code their primary work and technical assistance and access to tools are inaccessible, projects like this stagnate and die. Valve deserves recognition and credit for making this happen, just as well as CodeWeavers. The paired credit is absolutely the right way to do it, imo.
Saying Value is the number one contributor to Game Porting Toolkit just isn’t true though. Wine has been around for almost 30 years now and Value (only about 5 years ago) jumped on the only project that has any real success with running Win games on Linux. I was using Wine and Crossover to play games on my Mac before Proton was a thing. The real magic that pushes performance to acceptable levels has been the introduction of Apple’s own D3DMetal libraries.
Let’s give credit where credit is due.
CodeWeavers worked with Valve on Proton and Valve contributed the majority of the Wine (and, specifically wine-mono) updates that CodeWeavers is using. It’s why they’re credited as ValveCodeWeavers and CodeWeaversValve in various places in the sources and why the Proton repo lives in the ValveSoftware Git repo (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/proton/).