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, GPTK 4.0b2, against CrossOver 26.3 and crossover-preview-arm64-20260821. The CrossOver column says which builds each title was measured on. No bottle carried winevideo except where a page below says otherwise.

Game	Engine	Symptom	Fix	Backend	DX	CrossOver	Status
Mortal Shell 2	Unreal Engine 5.6.1	Crash on the first cutscene	Runtime patch, 4 sites	D3DMetal	12	26.3 · Preview	Fixed
Life is Strange: Reunion	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard	D3DMetal	12	Preview -- 26.3 crashes	Fixed
Life is Strange: Double Exposure	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard, same DLL	D3DMetal	12	Preview -- 26.3 crashes	Fixed
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture black	Video bridge, D3D11 to D3D12	D3DMetal	12	Preview -- crashes on 26.3	Fixed
Beast of Reincarnation	Unreal Engine 5	Startup video plays with sound, no picture	NV12 restored, Electra forced to software	D3DMetal	12	26.3 · Preview	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	Preview -- does not work on 26.3	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.

Which CrossOver, and what "Preview" means. Every measurement here was taken against CrossOver 26.3 and crossover-preview-arm64-20260821, and the CrossOver column says which of the two a title was measured on rather than which it might work on. Everything runs on that Preview. Two are confirmed on 26.3 as well. Both Life is Strange titles crash on 26.3, which is our defect and is open and unexplained. Persona 5 Strikers does not work on 26.3 either, which was not the expectation -- it depends on no decoder of CrossOver's, so it looked like the one that would carry over. It did not, and why is not established. DYNASTY WARRIORS crashes there too; that much was run, while the reason given for it is read from the two installs' plugin sets rather than from watching it fail.

None of these games needs CrossOver patched, wherever the container can be opened. That was not true when this project started, and it is the single biggest thing that changed. The qualifier is the whole of what remains, and it is a container question rather than a codec one.

Both builds decode VP9 the same way; what only Preview can do is open a WebM, which is the whole of the difference. DYNASTY WARRIORS ships 355 .webm cutscenes and cannot get as far as decoding on stable, while Mortal Shell 2 ships the same codec in .mp4, which both builds handle. The plugin-by-plugin comparison the conclusion rests on is in Findings, under The container, not the codec.

Persona 5 Strikers is the one title needing a codec no CrossOver ships -- VC-1 -- and that is staged beside it rather than patched into it.

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.

What each fix needs from CrossOver

The older form of this question was "does a fix need winevideo?", which framed it as a codec problem. It is not one, and asking it that way produced the wrong answer for the single title it existed to describe. What separates these six is what each fix needs CrossOver to have already done before it can start: open a container, decode a codec, or neither.

• DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS — a WebM demuxer. Its 355 cutscenes are .webm, and the bridge only presents frames that Media Foundation has already produced. Preview ships the matroska plugin and stable 26.3 does not, so on stable MFCreateSourceReaderFromByteStream fails at the open and nothing reaches a decoder at all. Both builds decode the VP9 inside a WebM identically, through applemedia and VideoToolbox. The evidence and its limits are on that title's page.
• Persona 5 Strikers — a VC-1 decoder, which it brings with it. No CrossOver ships one. It is staged beside the game rather than patched into the engine, so this fix depends on nothing CrossOver decodes.
• Everything else — nothing. Mortal Shell 2 decodes in-process with Electra's own libvpx; Beast of Reincarnation goes through an H.264 decoder both builds have; both Life is Strange freezes are inside DXGI and never touch video. One qualification on the last of those: the DLL those two install carries all three repairs, and its policy table arms only the node guard for them — but the Media Foundation hooks it installs go in for every title regardless, and that unconditional instrumentation is the standing suspicion for why those two crash on 26.3. The fault has nothing to do with video; the DLL touches video anyway.

On winevideo. On a current Preview none of these fixes needs it, and the VP9 and WebM plugins it installs are redundant there. On a stable build it ships a WebM demuxer, which is the thing DYNASTY WARRIORS has no other way to get — stable 26.3 carries no matroska plugin, read out of the two installs. That is a conclusion from what each build contains, not a measurement: the title has never been launched on stable, with winevideo or without it, so no dependency on it has been measured here. One unbuilt alternative, and the reasoning behind it, is in Findings, under The container, not the codec.

The mechanism these six share

Why each hook exists, which vtable slot each one takes, how a carrier DLL is picked and what was tried and did not work is in Findings. The division is deliberate: these pages carry the per-title findings and the wrong turns that came first, that one carries what is common to all of them.

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, and say which CrossOver build printed it. Measurements are the point of these pages, and a row without one is worse than no row.