macOS Metal API

[Packetdancer]

The closest thing to Metal support you might see is if MoltenVK (the Vulkan to Metal compatibility layer) gets support from DXVK (the DirectX to Vulkan compatibility layer/addon for Wine). So you'd effectively then have DirectX -> Vulkan -> Metal calls being made. (Which could very well still be more performant than Apple's increasingly bad OpenGL support and lack of native Vulkan support).

FWIW, this appears to be exactly the path the current version of CodeWeavers' Crossover system (built atop WINE) actually follows on Catalina; if you split open the current FFXIV macOS client (built atop Crossover) to get at the WINE bottle and run it in debugging mode on Cat—say, to try to figure out for someone why it's not working with Intel Iris graphics chips on Catalina any longer—you'll see DXVK initialize and then attempt to initialize Vulkan, which itself kicks off MoltenVK, and then you'll see MoltenVK initialize the Metal frameworks.

(Which is, I'm fairly sure, actually the root cause of why it no longer works with integrated graphics on Catalina; DXVK requires Vulkan 1.1 to properly simulate DirectX 11, and the features available on an Intel Iris integrated graphics chipset via Metal are sufficient to emulate Vulkan 1.0—really, I think it's 1.02, but I don't remember offhand—not 1.1. As a result, ffxiv_dx11.exe is told that DX11 is supported, attempts to initialize DX11, kicks off DXVK, which kicks off MoltenVK, which provides a Vulkan 1.0 interface, which DXVK says isn't enough... but it's not an error that can surface in a normal manner so things apparently just attempt to reinitialize in an endless loop, and you end up with an empty black window and a program desperately trying to figure out where its graphics API has gone.)