Forza Horizon 6 plays on macOS 27. Play asks for the new Wine 11 engine r18, which carries Apple's D3DMetal 4, and the recipe has D3DMetal present the graphics card as an Intel one, because the game crashes in its AMD-only code with the default. On a base M4 at 1080p it runs at about 28 fps on the High preset the game picks, 38 on Medium with FSR Balanced and 50 on Very Low. The first start spends about three minutes optimizing shaders, and the game asks you to sign in to Xbox once with a code at microsoft.com/link. These numbers come from one Mac, a base M4 with 32 GB. Online play, controllers and the game's benchmark mode are not validated yet.
Getting there needed three fixes in the Wine 11 engine, in both r18 and r19 (r19 is the same engine without D3DMetal 4, and the one other Wine 11 games are offered). Wine lacked a Windows function the game calls, GetIntegratedDisplaySize, taken from upstream Wine (Paul Gofman's work). On macOS Wine reported a program's address space as the memory it uses, so the game warned about low memory at 87 GB of 32. And looking up a saved credential failed whenever the Mac Keychain had no match, so every Xbox Live game lost its sign-in and asked again at each start. Highball's DirectX 12 layer in front of D3DMetal also covers two gaps in Apple's D3DMetal: a shader model question from newer games, which made Forza Horizon 6 report an unsupported graphics card after its latest update, and a multisampled depth resolve that froze the game at Character Select.
Play no longer waits forever on the first start of a game Steam recommends a controller for, when the game runs on D3DMetal. Steam shows a one-time notice before such a game starts, and in D3DMetal mode it cannot draw it, so the launch sat at "Launching". Play now records the notice as seen before it starts Steam for that game.
Highball always opens its window again. If you had turned off "Close windows when quitting an application" in System Settings, or used Quit and Keep Windows, quitting with only Settings open left every later launch with no window until you clicked the Dock icon.
Windows games can now show up in Discord for Mac, as "Playing" with the game's name, or with the game's own Rich Presence when it has one (highball#217). It is off by default. Turn on "Share game activity with Discord" in Settings to use it. Thanks to @matiasmg-ok for building it (PR #260).
The new Wine 11 engine was checked on an M4 against fifteen games that run on that line: Among Us, Five Nights at Freddy's, Counter-Strike 2, Umamusume, Heartopia, Guild Wars 2, Vindictus, Portal, Big Walk, Half-Life 2 Demo, ContractVille, Overwatch 2, GTA V, the Resident Evil 6 Benchmark and Red Dead Redemption 2 reach the same screens as on r17.