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jsheard parent
Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now.

https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...

radialstub
I believe this work is a continuation of the work the asahi linux people did to get games working on M-series macs. It seems Alyssa Rosenzweig works at valve as a contractor. Super cool work. Some seriously talented folks.
LeonM
Alyssa works for Intel now, so I doubt she'll be doing much contract work for Valve anymore...
embedding-shape
What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.
trenchpilgrim
On her website it says she is working on GPU drivers there - I wouldn't be surprised if that's something she greatly enjoys and Intel gave her then opportunity to work on official, production shipping drivers instead of reverse engineered third party drivers.
neilv
If I were Intel, this sounds like a great person to give an R&D skunkworks dream job.

Potential lottery ticket win, they are available for consulting internally anywhere that can add value, and they're not working for anyone else.

whizzter
Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real.
array_key_first
Personally I don't think ARM can make x86 irrelevant.

I believe low wattage SOCs can make traditional desktop hardware irrelevant (ish), but I think ARM is orthogonal to that.

6 More Comments →
forgotoldacc
I imagine there's also some challenging work that would be fun to dig into. Being the person who can clean up Intel's problems would be quite a reputation to have.
sulam
There’s a real limit on what level of problem one engineer can fix, regardless of how strong they are. Carmack at Meta is an example of this, but there are many. Woz couldn’t fix Apple’s issues, etc.

A company sufficiently scaled can largely only be fixed by the CEO, and often not even then.

ikety
I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.
bigyabai
Would it shock you to hear that many/most engineers don't pick an employer based on brand reputation?
collingreen
Would it shock you to hear that famous engineers with their own personal brand power have different opportunities and motivations than many/most engineers?
vasco
Their point is even made stronger by your comment. Engineers of this type don't experience megacorps like regular engineers. They usually have a non-standard setup and more leeway and less bureaucracy overhead. Which means brand isn't the biggest thing, the specific projects and end user impact are.
KerrAvon
usually a combination of money/benefits/locale is the answer to this question
skavi
Intel has a reputation of producing relatively high quality drivers for Linux.
Yokolos
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493

This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:

> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.

> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.

It's mentioned in this issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8136 which was closed Oct 2024 with this comment by kisak-valve:

> Hello @Theleafir1, similar to #1493, this is not a realistic objective for Proton any time in the near future.

baq
Finally some clarification on what valve time actually is.
mosselman
What do you mean? Could you share your insight?
dmonitor
it's running joke that Valve will announce something as "coming soon" only to release months or years later

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

AlienRobot
This kind of thing is what makes me trust Valve.
firen777
>"Coming Soon" (January 10, 2017) | December 20, 2024 | 7th Issue of Team Fortress Comics: The Days Have Worn Away

Out of all the IPs Valve owns, somehow it's TF2 that got a story conclusion and it couldn't have been more perfect.

amarant
Did someone say half life 3?
Andrex
Every time someone says "Half-Life 3" it's delayed another day from announcement. That's why everyone right now is talking about this "HLX" thing...
wetpaws (dead)
teroshan
Valve deciding to support Arm-based gaming is HUGE news
derefr
There was also a parallel effort to this end, targeting Android rather than plain Linux, resulting in an app called https://winlator.org/ — which also works quite well at this point. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0yUqcyY18)
pippy360
That was a very higher quality YT video. It's clearly written by someone who knows when they're talking about even though it's mostly non-technical
throawayonthe
nowadays FEX works better than box86 in my experience, on 'desktop' linux at least
pdpi
Have to wonder if there is a world where Proton comes to macOS.
jsheard OP
Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.
GeekyBear
> Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan.

You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.

On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.

jsheard OP
Valve could implement a separate Metal backend for Proton, what I'm saying is they probably wouldn't want to spend their resources on that.
derefr
Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
18 More Comments →
samtheprogram
That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.

I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.

The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.

6 More Comments →
alessandroberna
They could also use MoltenVK
jakogut
As far as I understand, there's actually an intermediate driver on macOS that implements Vulkan on top of Metal, similar to how Proton implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan.

The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.

miohtama
Wouldn't it be Apple's benefit to get more gaming on MacOS? Their goals might align with Steam.

Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it.

WhyNotHugo
Valve seems to break free form depending on someone else’s walled garden.

Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden.

Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software.

evilduck
Hard to swallow.

Every day I sit down at a Mac for work and proceed to launch VS Code, Zed, Outlook, DBeaver, Excel, Teams, LogSeq, Syncthing, Chrome, Firefox, LM Studio and Docker. I prefer MacOS but basically all of my application workflow exists for Windows verbatim and if using browser versions of the MS apps, on Linux too.

2 More Comments →
poulpy123
Apple is big enough to not need gaming and their philosophy is to have the most control possible on their ecosystem and to be the most closed possible. For them it makes no sense to encourage steam to be big on mac (except as a way to jumpstart their own system before closing it). And it is especially true now that steam is making machines, so is a direct competitor
sgentle
DXMT has been advancing very quickly: https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt
pdpi
True, forgot about that. That said, Apple does have D3DMetal. A man can dream that they eventually opensource that.
easyThrowaway
I mean, theoretically they could backport the D3DMetal wine driver from the Game Porting Toolkit. Also I remember there was some early preliminary work done on stock wine a few years ago.

Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times.

philo23
I believe that was part of the original plan for Proton, but with the success of the Steam Deck that got shelved and it moved to a focus purely on Linux.

I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment.

CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory.

GeekyBear
Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux.

The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.

Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.

pdpi
I mentioned elsewhere — Right now, using Wine/Crossover is a hassle. Wanting "Proton on Mac" isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
bsimpson
I did catch that the streaming stick for the Valve Frame in the announcement video was plugged into a computer that looked an awful lot like a Mac.
ENGNR
Yes! I rewound the video to double check

But honestly at this point I’m destined to buy a Steam Machine despite having a hefty Mac that could do gaming if only it were possible. Valve have been amazing about open computing and Apple are basically the enemy at this point.

It makes me wonder about what using steam machine for all computing might look like, as the new home of open computing and gaming.

bsimpson
I wonder if the video team uses Mac, and just shot a quick clip with the closest USB port on hand.
Bombthecat
Damn valve is cooking.

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