So you took the plunge too? It’s as if a new world opens up in front of you. Mac games run better and many games that didn’t work in Crossover now work. With Monterey I got black screen due to Unreal Engine and lack of geometry shader support. Now all those games seem to work and many new. With the enhanced performance of Mac games in Sonoma it’s as if I’ve suddenly got a few extra GPU cores.
Unfortunately neither of the OpenGL games works with D3DMetal in Crossover despite using DX 11. Sleeping Dogs and Mad Max crash or freeze and Shadow of Mordor shows heavily flickering graphics already in the menus making it impossible to test. To be fair it was the same problems in Crossover with both DXVK and Wine so I suspect it’s 23.5 that has broken the games. Shadow of Mordor worked in 22 but Mad Max had the same freeze problem even before. The only game that works in Crossover 23.5 with DXVK or Wine is Sleeping Dogs.
Regarding Alien Isolation you may be right. In Monterey at 3200x1800 I get stuttering and around 13 fps with Shadow Mapping at Ultra and SSAO off in the very first scene when I look around the room. With SSAO on I get about 9 fps so it’s very visible. In Sonoma with both settings on max I hardly feel the stuttering and with Shadow Mapping on high and SSAO on it feels quite smooth like 25-30 fps. It feels like 50% better performance so the SSAO bug is gone and Apple appears to have updated something related to OpenGL despite deprecating it. In Crossover I still get the black screen as shown before.
Even Shadow of Mordor is faster in Sonoma than Monterey. At 1440p high 21.5% better perfromance. At 1800p/1917p high/ultra 25% better perfromance. Notice that in Sonoma the res was 3400x1917 for some reason which is higher than 3200x1800 in Monterey. Yet even with higher res I got 25% better performance.
1440p High Monterey vs Sonoma
1800p Ultra Monterey vs 1917p Ultra Sonoma
Shadow of Mordor works in Crossover on Monterey but despite very high frame rates on some settings it suffers from massive stuttering in the benchmark test. It’s worst with DXVK where the lows are around 3 fps at 1440p. Even at lowest settings at 1440p or even 720p you can’t get more than 12-14 fps as minimum. With only Wine it works a bit better but the lows are still around 16-17 fps at ultra to medium settings so you can’t get rid of the stuttering. Only at low min fps goes up to 55. So I’m going to play the Mac port in Sonoma for the lows there even at the highest res and settings never go under 24-25 so no stuttering in the Mac benchmark.
1440p High/Medium vs 720p Lowest Monterey Crossover 23.5 DXVK
1440p High/Medium/Low Monterey Crossover 23.5 Wine
I tested Mad Max too which uses OpenGL like Alien Isolation. In Monterey I get 25-30 at max settings with VSYNC and Motion Blur off at 1800p (not 1440p as below). Like in Alien Isolation I chose the higher res to detect stuttering easier. In Monterey I feel the stuttering when it goes down to 25 when I run and jump around the beginning of the game with the injured dog but with the same max settings in Sonoma I don’t feel any stuttering so the performance is better there too like in Alien Isolation. So that’s another Mac port I’ll be playing in Sonoma.
The only game that worked in Crossover 23.5 in Sonoma was Sleeping Dogs. As I wrote in Crossover the game had double the performance of the Mac port already in Monterey. In Sonoma the performance is slightly better but depends on the res. At some resolutions it's faster in Crossover in Monterey. Here are the fastest results:
1080p DXVK Sonoma 75,5 fps
1440p Wine Monterey 64,4 fps
1800p Wine Monterey 56,8 fps
I’m also testing some Metal games so ”I’ll be back!”.
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