protium

Play your Windows games on a Mac. Run Windows Steam games on macOS with Wine and Apple's D3DMetal, on Apple silicon.

Elden Ring on a Mac mini M4: 60 fps at 1280×720, the game's own cap, or 33 fps at 2560×1440 with every setting on High. Your Steam library, in Windows Steam, on macOS. No Boot Camp, no virtual machine, no subscription.

protium is a free, open-source command-line tool that sets up the two pieces that make it work: Wine, which runs Windows programs on macOS, and D3DMetal, the Direct3D-to-Metal translator from Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit. Then it gets out of the way:

protium runtime install       # Wine, ready-built
protium d3dmetal install      # Apple's D3DMetal
protium prefix new default    # a Windows C: drive
protium install steam
protium run "elden ring"

It costs nothing, sends nothing anywhere, and everything it sets up is yours to inspect. It runs single-player games; anti-cheat does not work.

Tip

To play tonight, buy CrossOver instead. It ships Wine and D3DMetal prebuilt and supported. protium is free and early, and leaves you with an environment you can see into and change.

Quickstart

1. What you need

• An Apple silicon Mac on macOS 15 or later. Apple's D3DMetal 4.0b2 needs macOS 26.4 or later.
• Apple's Game Porting Toolkit DMG, which needs a free Apple developer account. Leave it in ~/Downloads, where your browser saves it. More about it.

2. Install protium

V=$(curl -fsSLo /dev/null -w '%{url_effective}' https://github.com/Benehiko/protium/releases/latest)
V=${V##*/}                   # the latest release's tag, such as v0.3.0
curl -LO https://github.com/Benehiko/protium/releases/download/$V/protium-$V-macos-aarch64.tar.gz
tar -xzf protium-$V-macos-aarch64.tar.gz
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
install -m 755 protium-$V-macos-aarch64/protium ~/.local/bin/protium
protium version

If protium version fails, add ~/.local/bin to your PATH. Every release is signed; the release notes show how to check it.

3. Set up Wine and D3DMetal

protium runtime install      # Wine from this release, and Rosetta 2 if your Mac lacks it
protium d3dmetal install     # Apple's D3DMetal, from the toolkit DMG in ~/Downloads
protium prefix new default   # create a Windows prefix
protium shell-init           # print a line to add to your shell's rc file

Wine is checked against the SHA-256 this release was signed with before it is installed. If Rosetta 2 is missing, Apple asks you to accept its licence in your terminal. Saved the toolkit somewhere else? protium d3dmetal install <path-to-dmg>. Lost? protium status says what comes next.

Prefer to build Wine yourself? See Build Wine yourself.

4. Install Steam and play

protium install steam
protium run steam            # sign in online, once
protium run "elden ring"     # by title, Steam app ID, or .exe name

protium installs Steam with the fixes it needs on a Mac, and finds your games in every Steam library. Elden Ring's menu reads OFFLINE; that is expected, and CONTINUE loads your save. Using protium covers Steam, games and prefixes in full.

Elden Ring with mods and co-op

elden-ring-mods runs Elden Ring on protium with Lua mods and private co-op over LAN or a VPN. Its launcher, ermod-engine, finds protium on your PATH or at ~/.local/bin/protium, picks the prefix that holds Elden Ring, and launches through protium run --prefix <name>:

./ermod-engine --dry-run              # finds your game and protium; launches nothing
./ermod-engine --backend protium      # play, through protium

It never writes to your game install or your saves, and Easy Anti-Cheat never runs. Download it from its latest release (…-macos-aarch64.tar.gz) and follow its macOS install guide.

Learn more

• Using protium: Steam, running games, prefixes, everyday commands
• What works: what plays, what doesn't yet, and how fast
• D3DMetal: what Apple ships, and where to get it
• Build Wine yourself: from CodeWeavers' published sources
• Why not Proton?
• elden-ring-mods: Elden Ring with Lua mods and co-op, on protium
• Contributing and the AI policy

FAQ

Can I play Windows games on a Mac? Yes, on an Apple silicon Mac. protium runs them in Wine, and Apple's D3DMetal translates Direct3D to Metal. No Boot Camp or virtual machine is involved.

Can I play Steam games on macOS that only have a Windows version? Yes. protium installs Windows Steam into a Wine prefix, finds the games in your Steam libraries, and launches them by title: protium run "elden ring".

Is it free? Yes. protium is open source under Apache 2.0, and it has no subscription. CrossOver is the paid, supported option.

Do online games with anti-cheat work? No. protium runs single-player games. What works lists the details.

Can I use an Xbox controller? Yes, over Bluetooth or USB, from protium v0.4.0, and with rumble from v0.5.0. A new install gets the runtime that supports both, wine-11.0-cx26.3-p6. If you are upgrading from an older runtime, protium keeps using that one until you switch: protium use --runtime wine-11.0-cx26.3-p6. USB responds faster than Bluetooth. Game controllers has the details.

Licence

protium's own code is Apache 2.0. The Wine patches in patches/ are LGPL-2.1-or-later, like Wine. Wine and D3DMetal are not protium's to license: THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md records their terms.

Important

protium ships no part of Apple's redistributable, and nothing built from this repository should.

protium is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple, CodeWeavers, the Wine project or Valve.