Running modern OpenGL Windows games on Crossover

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/macgaming

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • mesa-dist-win

    Pre-built Mesa3D drivers for Windows

  • I've managed to run Windows game (Homeworld Remastered) that uses modern OpenGL (3.3) on Crossover using Mesa Zink (OpenGL implementation over Vulkan) build for Windows that you can find here: mesa-dist-win. So if you check Homeworld Remastered or any other modern OpenGL game status on Crossover you will notice that it doesn't work. The issue is that Crossover OpenGL support is limited to 2.1 even if macOS itself supports up to 4.1. I'm not sure why but that means no modern OpenGL Windows games for us. This is where Mesa Zink comes to shine. Zink is Mesa (open source OpenGL/Vulkan/etc. and drivers implementations that are used by Linux and some other operating systems) driver that implements OpenGL on top of Vulkan. There is no native Vulkan on macOS but there is MoltenVK. I was curious if MoltenVK is good enough to run Zink and some big game and turns out it is. Homeworld is working fine and performance is good. I didn't play whole campaign so I can't promise it will work without any issues but I tested it in tutorials and Player vs CPU mode and it seems to work fine with only two minor issues - game will crash if anti aliasing is enabled and there is some minor graphical glitches with invisible ships.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

    WorkOS logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts