MacGameVideoFix 5.3.1

Two new games.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2: no more T-pose or broken symbiote. This is macprotips' fix, plus one improvement of ours.

On M1-M4 Macs, D3DMetal returns 0 for typed buffer reads past element 2^28 and drops typed writes past it. The game reads and writes its 2 GB character mesh pool exactly that way, so characters stay in a T-pose and the symbiote shows up as spikes, a flat black sheet, or not at all. macprotips found this and fixed it: the wide views are made raw, and four shaders are rebuilt raw on your Mac from your own copy of the game. Their code ships here unchanged in what it does.

What this release adds to their fix:

• No DLL override. The fix rides on a DLL the game already loads, so it works under CrossOver, RaccoonBot or NotProton with nothing set in the bottle or the launch options.
• No more black blocks in the sandstorm stage. These are a different fault: a missing barrier after the volumetric fog copy, which vkd3d-proton also adds for this game. With the barrier, the copy ran 8030 times in one session and no blocks were seen. Without it they flashed now and then. That is one clean session, so it is evidence rather than proof.

The first install downloads macprotips' release once (sha256 pinned) to take Microsoft's shader tools from it. Each rebuilt shader must match the one macprotips verified, or nothing is installed.

God of War: no more white specks on characters.

The game tests depth with EQUAL against a depth prepass, and the translated shaders do not match the prepass to the last bit, so specks appear all over Kratos in dim light. A r/macgaming poster found the cause. The fix creates that one depth test as GREATER_EQUAL, without a DLL override and without copying anything from CrossOver, so a DXMT update needs nothing done.

• Measured on DXMT in CrossOver Preview 27, under Rosetta and under FEX: specks without the fix, none with it. D3DMetal not measured.

Both games were measured on CrossOver Preview 27 through NotProton, and the wiki says so on their rows. Their fixes need nothing from the engine.

In the app, "Shader fix" is now Rendering fix, since it covers a depth test as well as shaders.