There's a way to run VAM on Macbook M1-M2 chips with great performance!

[labato80]

Hi everyone,
I've been playing VAM since 3 years and loved the community, so much great content and talented modders!
As everyone here I've been using my PC system to run VAM.
But as a nerd I wanted to experiment and with some curiosity I managed to run VAM on Macbook M2 PRO with 16GB!
The key is the new translation layer between DX12 and MacOs Metal available in a Windows emulator called Cr*oss*over (remove asterisks).

There are tons of guides to setup Crossover for gaming (which honestly it's easy as pie).
You just run an external command pointing to the game .bat to run within the emulator.
Thanks to the latest updates to libraries the performance left me speechless.
I was getting 200fps on a scene with a single person in it and not too much lighting.
To be honest I'm already impressed it ran at all!

I'll be playing a little bit more with this as the power and portability of MacBooks is insane.
Not to mention they're almost dead silent and barely heating up.
Although after 10 mins the raw power of the GPUs start the fans to spin, but nothing comparable to my gaming laptop with which is basically a jet and consuming 200W.
Here we're talking about 54W!

I have attached a screenshot of VAM running on MacOS with Rosetta emulation. The hair multiplier and density seems to kill most of the performance, but keeping them at lower values you can easily achieve 60-120fps!

So happy about this discovery, asit runs basically similarly to my RTX2070 equipped laptop!

Please let me know if you have any questions and feel free to share your thoughts!

 

[hazmhox]

I'm gonna assume a lot because this is only what you show in your shot, but... I wouldn't put this under "great performances" with a single character and an empty scene haha.

That said, nice test : )

 

[labato80]

You're right, I didn't post much to explain how it's working, just a single screenshot doesn't tell much.
Also the scene is quite simple. I don't have much time nowadays and I was super excited about the finding that I decided to post quickly.
But honestly I was so impressed that everything worked right away.
I was talking about great performance as I was assuming running VAM on a M-chipset Macbook would have been impossible, or if it worked, with very low FPS (like 10-15).
Instead, I was happy to see the Compatibility layer is working very well, as I was getting 200fps with one character, with almost stock settings and a couple of lights.
Clearly the Nvidia GPUs have more raw power, dedicated shaders for hair, etc. It's not comparable.
But I had always the curiosity to find out if a day I would have been able to run a secondary machine, such as a Macbook.
This is far from being optimised and the same scene can go down do 20fps in the same session, but if you run VAM again it will be back on 60-90 fps.
Of course having an RTX4090 it's like night and day, but I think the results aren't that bad!

My process was quite easy, anyone can try it, that's why I didn't post additional documentation, but happy to that if anyone interested.
The steps were the following:

• Download Cr*osso*ver, it has 14 days trial to tryout the features, it's well known platform nowadays
• Install it and create a bottle with D3DMetal and Msync enabled
• Open C Drive on the bottle (right side of the menu) and copy the VAM folder whenever you prefer (inside the bottle, it's like a Virtual Machine but being based on Wine emulation)
• Then click on the right side on Run Command and search for the .bat file to run desktop mode.
• Done, all set up and VAM should run quickly and easily with no major issues.
  

 

[sliver]

So, the installer is an exe file.You say copy the VAM folder onto the virtual C drive, but the only thing that seems to be available is that exe. I tried running the exe installer within the c--over program, but kept getting errors. Could you clarify?

 

[labato80]

So, the installer is an exe file.You say copy the VAM folder onto the virtual C drive, but the only thing that seems to be available is that exe. I tried running the exe installer within the c--over program, but kept getting errors. Could you clarify?

VAM needs just to be copied in the C drive of the bottle, do not install it using the Cross*ver function to install any apps as it won't work.
The icon in my screen is pointing to the game .bat and it's just a link that was created using the Run command button on the right side.
Use that one for the first time running VAM.
Click on Run command and search for the VAM .bat in the VAM root folder, which it will be inside the virtual C drive.
Can you post a screenshot of the errors popping up?
Thanks

Please note this works only for desktop mode. VR as far as I know won't work.

 

[Solstice]

It's awesome that it manages to work on an M2 chip. Will VR be possible especially when the more powerful chips get released next year?

 

[saiklo]

It's awesome that it manages to work on an M2 chip. Will VR be possible especially when the more powerful chips get released next year?

Its not possible. Valve and Meta don't make VR drivers for MacOS anymore. Theres no way to hook it into the Vision Pro either.

I tried all this a year ago on Crossover with my M2 Max and gave up and just built a powerful Windows machine for VAM instead.

 

[Digi]

I really want this to work on vision pro and we're so close. According to other threads vam supports open XR. From discussions I've had with the ALVR devs on discord, games that support OpenXR can be made to work with ALVR, and ALVR has intentions of adding MacOS support via Monado.

Steps to get this working on Apple Vision Pro seem to be:

1) Vam supports OpenXR
2) Vam runs on MacOS
3) ALVR client runs on Vision Pro
4) ALVR server will run on MacOS after we get this feature: https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/issues/2047

This assumes that VAM's integration with OpenXR works with the ALVR server...which is open source.