CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hi,

I'm trying to run Steam games with CrossOver Version 21.1 (21.1.0.33869) on my MacBookPro (2021, 16", M1Pro with 32GB RAM, latest MacOS), but several games I tried, and even which are marked as 'Perfect' on Apple Gaming Wiki (like Borderlands: Game of the Year Enhanced) don't work.

For example Borderlands doesn't start at all from Steam. If I open the game dir, and start BorderlandsGOTY.exe, it starts up, but most video scenes are some green mess. The menu works and I can start the game, but is is laggy as hell, and has several glitches (objects disappear and reapper constantly, etc), and it is practically unplayable. The video properties are set to very low, resolution is 960x600, and it still produces only 3-4 FPS.

Had performance issues with many other games, including games which were working with CrossOver on a very old 2014 MacBook Pro.

Tried to install Steam on a separate, new bottle, tried with DXVK backand on and off, but couldn't make it work.

Is there anything I should do/try to get good performance?

Yup, you got an M1. Say goodbye to most games that used to run. Intel to ARM conversion costs a lot of processing power if you're not using Rosetta.

My apologies, but that is the current situation. Only a few Windows games will run successfully on an M1, despite how powerful they are. You can either try Parallels where they usually work a lot better, or use a Windows-PC.

Ah, thanks. That's kinda relieving :)
But I still find it strange that the game is marked as 'perfect' on M1, while it is hardly playable.
Not a big deal, there are several games which are really working, I just was curious if I screwed up something :)

Hi Norbert.

I just looked at the Borderlands database entry on the CodeWeavers website and it is currently rated as "installs, will not run", tested with 21.0.0. Most posts there are over 4 years old. Where have you seen that BL should work on an M1?

Just curious. One guess, you might have seen Andrew Tsai's YT series where he shows BL 3. That kinda seems to work, but AFAIK he never mentions BL 1.

Edit: Ok, I get where the confusion is coming from. I just looked up BL:GOTY on the AppleGamingWiki. Well, I guess one of them must be wrong. Unfortunately AppleGamingWiki is not very helpful as it doesn't tell you what computer and CrossOver settings the user that made the entry used.
Edit 2: I'm pretty sure that the entry about Parallels not working is also outdated, as we're now at Parallels 17, not 16.

Yup, that was AppleGamingWiki. It is supposed to be M1-specific, and the footnote on that page shows an M1 MacBook as verifier, but I just noticed it is about Parallels, not Crossover.

But the 'installs, not run' is not correct, I was able to start the game in a separate bottle, and even the glitches disappeared. So it was working, but very slow, almost unplayable. But - it runs. Or more likely, slowly walks :)

This is pretty much my experience with M1. Games that used to work smootly, are now very, very jerky. Guess we will have to live with it for the time being. sigh

I replaced my mid 2014 MacBook Pro with the new M1Pro MBP, so for me, pretty much all the games very jerky on the old machine too, not too much change in this regard :D

The jerky games tend to be 32 bit in my experience and due to that support being removed from MacOs. Halo MCC and Titanfall 2 run really well. Crossover managed to work some wonders getting 32 bit titles to run at all. There are whispers it could improve on future. Until then Parallels is your best bet.

Yup, it's the 32-Bit titles that are the problem. My assumption(!) is, that they're not using Rosetta to translate these games.

Andreas Weik wrote:

Yup, it's the 32-Bit titles that are the problem. My assumption(!)
is, that they're not using Rosetta to translate these games.

32bit is an issue, but also I found there are a few Intel-specific SIMD instructions that don't exist on the M1 side and can't be emulated. I don't run into it often but found a game or two that like to use something we can't run on a M1.

32bit is slow due to the shim library. Parallels running Windows 10/11 seems to handle this with their emulation layer.

Removed as requested.

Roger White wrote:

These obviously alter the Crossover installation so I would assume
support from Codeweavers would not be forthcoming. Use at your own
risk.

You are correct - we absolutely do not recommend any changes made to the shipped CrossOver product and we will not provide support if you choose to do so.

Meredith Johnson wrote:

You are correct - we absolutely do not recommend any changes made to
the shipped CrossOver product and we will not provide support if you
choose to do so.

Even thought my linked comment was premised with a warning about this, maybe it would be better to remove these instructions?

There was another third-party guide that used a crosstie and modified CrossOvers MoltenVK/DXVK but I’d had them add the same warning about a lack of CodeWeavers support after using said guide.

I can't get any of my 32-bit d3d8/d9 games to run in Windows 64-bit bottles in CrossOver 21.1, and the only 64-bit d3d11 game I've tried (IL-2 Sturmovik Great Battles) crashes the moment I start any mission, which never happened before with my 2019 16" Intel MacBook Pro.

And the 32-bit games that do run in Windows XP or 7 bottles on my M1 Max 32-Core GPU 14" MacBook Pro struggle along with non-playable frame rates, forcing me to switch to Parallels Desktop 17 for now, which I hope is a temporary solution since I would much prefer to take advantage of all of my system resources in CrossOver. Surprisingly, I note that when running IL-2 Sturmovik Great Battles in a Windows 11 x64 ARM virtual machine the frame rates are quite impressive, with Activity Monitor reporting nearly 100% of my GPU capacity being assigned to Parallels.

I'll keep trying with each new release of CrossOver and am hoping for the best!

Cheers