Sandcastle 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.

No dated Highball run yet. When one lands it records the renderer, the engine build and the macOS version it was seen on — which is what stops a verdict quietly rotting. Send one.

Notes

The demo, reported perfect on D3DMetal after a short session on an M3 with the steam and vcrun2022 recipes. The appid here is the demo's. No frame rate was given and nothing was measured here.

Provenance

Reported by xcagricolak (highball-db#223, 2026-09-26) on the demo (Steam 4894830), Apple M3, macOS 27.0, Highball 0.9.35, engine x64-sikarugir10.0_6-r7, D3DMetal, AVX advertised, rated 5 of 5 after 7 minutes. Not verified by the maintainer.

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

Common questions

Does Sandcastle work on Mac?

Sandcastle has no native Mac build, but it is reported to run on Apple Silicon through Highball, a free open-source compatibility layer. This comes from community reports rather than a Highball test run, so treat it as a reasonable expectation rather than a guarantee.

Which renderer should I use for Sandcastle?

D3DMetal. Highball can translate Direct3D through DXVK, DXMT or Apple's D3DMetal, and the right choice varies by game. The database records D3DMetal for Sandcastle. Highball uses it automatically when the game has a row; to set it by hand, open Settings, then Environments.

Contribute a result

This page is generated from an open database. If you have run Sandcastle 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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