GW2 on Mac 0.1.0

GW2 on Mac 0.1.0

The first version: Guild Wars 2 on Apple silicon, set up in one click through Steam, ArenaNet's own installer or the game files you already have.

Its own engine and bottle

GW2 on Mac doesn't touch anything you already have. It downloads its own Wine engine (CrossOver
26.3 with Wine 11, from athei's wine-build, checked by its checksum), creates the game's own Wine
bottle with Retina and Game Mode, and installs the game into it: through Steam, with Valve's own
installer, or through ArenaNet's installer, Gw2Setup-64.exe, which you download from ArenaNet's
site and drop into the window. GW2 on Mac checks that file's ArenaNet signature first. Every
download of the game comes from Valve or ArenaNet.

Game files you already have

Already play Guild Wars 2 in CrossOver, Whisky or an app wrapper? Choose Game files I already
have: GW2 on Mac finds those installs and brings the game into its own bottle without
downloading it again. On the same disk it is a clone, instant and without taking extra space;
from another disk it is copied. Your graphics settings and remembered login can come along too.
The original stays exactly as it is.

Steam in the background

After your first sign-in, Play starts Steam without its window and Steam starts the game. You can
turn this off in Settings › Game.

Direct3D 11 straight to Metal

The game draws through our build of DXMT (e02a4d6), tuned for busy maps on Metal 4: fewer
command buffers and Map calls per frame, a residency set, and shader warming, which builds the
pipelines your last sessions used before the game asks for them. Its shader cache is GW2 on Mac's
own, in ~/Library/Caches/GW2 on Mac, apart from any other DXMT setup on your Mac. The game no
longer crashes as it quits: DXMT pins itself in memory, so it is never unloaded while its threads
still run.

The Metal HUD (Settings › Graphics) shows over the game only, not over Steam's windows.

Tuned for crowds

A tuned Wine for the game's threads: an event pool for its job groups, single wakes for its job
workers, short spins before sleeps on busy locks, and three of its job workers on the cooler
cores. Settings › Performance turns each of them off, and sets how many CPUs the game sees, from 2
up to all of your Mac's.

Sharp text at 4K

Settings › Interface can make the game's Interface Size "Larger" larger, from the game's own
crisp fonts. It is off by default and asks first: it changes the game's memory, which ArenaNet
doesn't support, and may stop working after a game update.

Yours, and reversible

Uninstall removes everything GW2 on Mac created: the engine, the bottle with the game in it, and
its caches, DXMT's shader cache with them. Collect Logs… makes a zip for bug reports without account names or passwords.

Support

GW2 on Mac is an unofficial project, not made, endorsed or supported by ArenaNet or NCSOFT, and
you use it at your own risk. Please send questions and bug reports to Pharaphobia on
Discord or as a GitHub issue,
never to ArenaNet's support.