Trying to get Age of Mythology: Extended Edition running well

[roryabraham]

I've got Age of Mythology up and running in a Windows 10 bottle w/ Whisky 2.2.2, but the game doesn't really run well enough to use – getting getting about 15-25 fps on my 2023 Macbook Pro M2 Max.

I'm pretty sure this is not a hardware limitation but a slowdown caused by the translation layer (d3dmetal?).

Anyways, I'm a noob at game porting / development in general but would love to see if we can get this game running well on mac. Definitely open to suggestions, and I'm going to dump my troubleshooting in this discussion.

[roryabraham]

So the first thing I'll note is that when I first opened the game I was getting really bad skipping in the audio. Opening Audio Midi Setup and setting audio output to 44,100 Hz, as suggested here helped a lot. There's still some audio skipping, but generally it happens when framerates drop particularly low,

[roryabraham]

I'll also note that I've tried it with DXVK both off (default) and on. My understanding is that the default would be to use d3d-metal, and that DXVK is a vulkan-based alternative. Unfortunately in both scenarios the game runs poorly.

[roryabraham]

I also see that there's some evidence that this game can run passably over wine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjqASj6GwH8. This is an old video, and was on Linux not MacOS, but it gives me some hope.

[roryabraham]

Here's a more recent video of it apparently running smoothly on Linux via Proton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f3PpcKm_-I

[roryabraham]

Also, looks like unsurprisingly, I'm not the first person to attempt this. That person reported similar performance issues using CrossOver, but found that it worked seamlessly with parallels, only with intermittent crashes.

Edit: The same user reported it working much better in CrossOver 22.1 beta 2

[roryabraham]

There apparently are reports of this working on an intel mac via PortingKit/Crossover: https://www.portingkit.com/game/1436

[roryabraham]

Going to attempt the obvious and try to run it on CrossOver instead of Whisky

[roryabraham]

Still getting 15-25 fps with CrossOver 23.7.1

[roryabraham]

Another idea to explore:

with late 90's and the early 2000s games that are not performing well in WINE the chances are it was written for the Voodoo 3 so it will have GLIDE support so try installing the GLIDE wrapper in your WINE bottle, Diablo 2 is a perfect example of this (even if you are using the new version you can download it still has GLIDE support). So keep that in mind when playing games of that era

...

What would you recommend for games like the Age Of Empires series? Those make use of DirectDraw.

...

https://www.reddit.com/r/wine_gaming/comments/m8hafb/why_is_directdraw_so_slow/

[roryabraham]

Maybe another thing that I could try is running the game directly using AGPT and trying to capture logs to see why the translation is running so slowly