Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy on Mac

Which renderer to use

Highball can run each game through three different Direct3D translation layers. This is what the database knows for this title — empty rows are open questions, not failures.

Last confirmed 2026-09-13. That run predates per-report engine and macOS logging, so those are not recorded for it. A newer report would carry both.

Notes

Playable on the r5 engine, which carries the fix. DirectX 12 only: on DXMT it stops at "No suitable D3D12 adapter found" before the splash, so D3DMetal is the only mode that reaches the game, and Highball asks for Apple's licence at the first launch. Reached gameplay twice from a clean start on 2026-09-09: 27.5 fps at 1280x720 in the opening scene, 17-32 fps in play, and about 10 fps for the first minute while shaders compile. The Metal HUD reports GPU time of 12.9 ms against a 36.4 ms frame interval, so it is CPU-bound rather than GPU-bound, which is what Rosetta plus 3080 draws and 3049 ExecuteIndirect calls per frame costs. A dialog saying "Your graphics card driver is older than supported" appears before the game starts; answer Yes. CodeWeavers' own testers report the same prompt, so it is expected here and not a sign of a broken install.

On engines before r5 the game renders its splash and menu and then crashes on Play Game. That crash was an unhandled page fault reading 0x907 inside SwitchToFiber, which was handed 0x8ff instead of a fiber pointer. The cause was in Wine, not the game: on macOS the %gs base is the host thread block rather than the TEB, and Wine mirrors only some TEB fields into it. Tib.FiberData was not mirrored, so GetCurrentFiber(), a compiler intrinsic that reads that slot directly and cannot be intercepted, returned the host value 0x8ff, which the game's job system passed straight back to SwitchToFiber. Highball's engine patch 0008 keeps the mirror in step at the three places kernelbase changes the field. An earlier version of this entry blamed D3DMetal's missing DirectX 12 timestamp queries and named Highball's timestamp shim as the fix; that was wrong and is retracted. The shim was loaded and active during a reproduction of the crash and changed nothing. Re-verified on engine x64-crossover26.3-r8 on 2026-09-13 (M1 Pro, macOS 26.6.2, Highball 0.9.9, D3DMetal): launcher, Play Game, the opening bedroom scene under keyboard control at 41 to 42 fps, 1280x720 windowed, GPU 10.7 ms, no fault. r8 replaces the r5 fiber mirror with a slot swap (the mirror hung Metaphor: ReFantazio), and this game still plays on it. The recipe keeps asking for r5, the engine it was first verified on; any later CrossOver-tree engine works too.

One-click setup

Highball ships a recipe for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: open the game in your Library and apply it. The recipe carries the tested renderer and any per-game fixes, so you don't have to reproduce them by hand. Read the recipe.

Provenance

reported by HappySmurfday (highball#63) on an Epic copy; played here on the Steam copy, M1 Pro, macOS 26.6.2, engine x64-crossover26.3-r5, 2026-09-09

Before installing anything, it is worth checking whether the game already ships a native Mac build.

Common questions

Does Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy work on Mac?

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy has no native Mac build, but it is reported to run on Apple Silicon through Highball, a free open-source compatibility layer. Highball has run it on Apple Silicon (last confirmed 2026-09-13).

Which renderer should I use for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy?

D3DMetal. Highball can translate Direct3D through DXVK, DXMT or Apple's D3DMetal, and the right choice varies by game. The database records D3DMetal for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, and applying the Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy recipe sets it for you.

Is there a one-click setup for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy?

Yes. Highball ships a recipe for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy that sets the tested renderer and any per-game fixes. Open the game in your Library and apply it.

Contribute a result

This page is generated from an open database. If you have run Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy on Apple Silicon, working or not, a report takes a minute and fills in the empty rows above. Send a report, or read how the data is put together.

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