Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Stadia alternatives

As a Linux user that is not fond of Wine* that you cannot drink I was happy playing on Stadia.

For completely none game related reasons I am contemplating the purchase of a Mac.

Apart from having to wait for patches, is playing on a Mac a good experience?

Are there any rumours** of support being added for any other cloud based gaming platforms?

Sorry if these questions have already been answered but I have drifted away from the game ever since the Stadia announcement.


* Wine is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems.

** Yes, I am British

I think the experience question will depend on the resources your Mac has available. I have a MB Pro, M2 with 24GB memory. The game plays very well, though it does run warm when I am playing. I use a laptop cooling pad and seems to help.

I imagine that once the game is optimized for release, the experience is going to be even better.

Thanks corporal8, I was contemplating an M2 with 16GB of memory so it sounds like I am in the right ballpark.

You can try another cloud gaming solution. For example, Shadow allows you to install any game on your remote system.

your best option to play any game is to grab yourself a Windows 10 laptop that has a Gpu chip [not a intergrated gpu as they are just X% of your Cpu]

as a Linux user you are screwed... its never going to be a good gaming option because there are too many versions to even consider supporting it

and Mac users are in almost as bad a senario with your Apple charging 4X as much $ for the same hardware you get in a Windows system then treating Gpu as something they stepped in with no drivers to run it

For the same hardware? Have you heard of the M1 chips? These have been out for nearly over 4 years.
These things are quite fast for games (blazingly fast for video editing et.), stays ultra cool, no noise, and are incredibly efficient. Not gaming I get a solid 10 hours + charge, gaming around 4hours for BG3. Not even OPTIMIZED for the M1 yet and I still get over 60fps on ultra settings.

And yet it runs very well on my Steam Deck = Steam OS = Linux

Like you, I used to not really like using Wine because it usually required significant work to get each and every Windows game working. I remember John Carmack, around 2012, suggesting that improving Wine would be the best route to Linux Gaming, and thinking he was mad.

But it transpires that JC was mostly right; its much more practical to implement the Windows APIs on Linux than convince countless games studios to port their games.

The downside, for those Linux gamers that are dogmatic about open source, is that the easiest way to use Linux for gaming is to use Valve's Steam Launcher wherever possible. Because, over the last few years, Valve have put the most effort and funding into both Linux and Wine game support, almost everything "just works" for me. I even find it much easier to install and use other windows-only game launchers like EPIC and EA by running them through Steam as "external applications" using the Proton compatibility layer (a superset of Wine).

While although the Mac has more native ports than Linux, it is still a subset of the games available for Windows, so you might still have to consider other options like Wine, which is likely to be less fun on Macs that run not only a different OS, but also a different Instruction Set.