Games

Games

Titles we have deliberately taken on, and what was measured on each. This is not an inventory of anyone's library — a game gets a row when there was a reason to work on it.

Tested on an M4 Max, macOS 27, CrossOver 26.2 patched with winevideo, GPTK 4.0b2.

Game	Engine	Symptom	Fix	Backend	DX	Status
Mortal Shell 2	Unreal Engine 5.6.1	Crash on the first cutscene	Runtime patch, 4 sites	D3DMetal	12	Fixed
Life is Strange: Reunion	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard	D3DMetal	12	Fixed
Life is Strange: Double Exposure	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard, same DLL	D3DMetal	12	Fixed
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture black	Video bridge, D3D11 to D3D12	D3DMetal	12	Fixed
Beast of Reincarnation	Unreal Engine 5	Startup video plays with sound, no picture	NV12 restored, Electra forced to software	D3DMetal	12	Fixed
Persona 5 Strikers	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Video never starts; sound only	Staged VC-1 codec, and a D3D9 to D3D11 bridge	DXMT	11	Fixed

Backend and DX are not preferences, they are requirements. Persona 5 Strikers only works on DXMT: it needs a shared D3D9 surface handle, and DXMT implements sharing where D3DMetal has none to build on. The other five run on D3DMetal with the D3D12 renderer, which is also what keeps PSO precompilation -- -dx11 dodges some of these faults and costs permanent shader-compilation stutter.

None of these games needs CrossOver patched, on a build that already decodes VP9. That was not true when this project started, and it is the single biggest thing that changed: CrossOver Preview decodes VP9 profile 0 and 2, H.264 and AAC on its own. The one thing that still depends on the engine is DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS, which decodes VP9 through Media Foundation and has nothing to present without it -- so on an older or stable build it still needs winevideo, and on a current Preview it does not. Persona 5 Strikers needs a VC-1 decoder no CrossOver ships, and that is staged beside it rather than patched into it -- which also makes it the one title here that does not care what CrossOver decodes.

Which engine, per title. Measured: Mortal Shell 2, Beast of Reincarnation and Persona 5 Strikers run on stable 26.3 and on Preview. The other three crash on stable, for two unrelated reasons. DYNASTY WARRIORS was expected to -- it decodes VP9 through Media Foundation and stable ships none, which is the winevideo requirement on its own row, now measured rather than predicted. Both Life is Strange titles are our own defect: they share the H.264 half, which restores NV12 after CrossOver removes it on macOS and was written against Preview's behaviour. That one is open. Use Preview for those three.

None of these fixes decodes anything. The frames existed all along; they were being crashed on, mislabelled, or thrown away.

Every row is a title we deliberately took on, and every claim on the linked page comes from a measurement on an installed copy.

One bottle cannot hold all of these

CX_GRAPHICS_BACKEND divides them. Five run on d3dmetal; Persona 5 Strikers runs only on dxmt, because it needs a shared D3D9 surface handle and D3DMetal has none to give.

Steam libraries are shared between bottles, so giving that one a bottle of its own costs no disk and no re-download. Switching the backend by hand also works and means remembering to switch it — and a forgotten backend looks exactly like a fix that stopped working.

Does a fix need winevideo?

One question, and the table above no longer carries a column for it: does the fix need the engine to decode video before it can work?

• DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS — yes. It decodes VP9 through Media Foundation, and the bridge only presents frames. Without a decoder there is no frame to present. A current CrossOver Preview supplies it; an older or stable build needs winevideo.
• Everything else — no. The fault has nothing to do with video decoding. Both Life is Strange titles freeze inside DXGI; the cutscenes were never the problem. Persona 5 Strikers is the separate case: it needs VC-1, which no CrossOver ships, staged beside it rather than patched into it.

winevideo is worth having regardless. This is about what each fix depends on, not about whether to install it.

Adding a row

Run the survey on that game's folder, and if it misbehaves, the probe. Both are in diagnostics/ and both are described in Diagnosing a new game.

Paste what they print. Measurements are the point of these pages, and a row without one is worse than no row.