Setup
Wine Bottles & DXMT
Understand how MoltenVR's managed Wine bottles work, how DXMT translates D3D11 to Metal, and how to use an existing Whisky or CrossOver bottle.A Wine bottle is a self-contained Windows environment that lives inside macOS — it has its own virtual C: drive, registry, and set of Windows libraries, completely isolated from the rest of your system. MoltenVR uses a bottle to run Windows VR games without a separate Windows PC, then streams every rendered frame to your headset in real time.
How MoltenVR's bottle works
Inside the bottle, two critical components are installed and configured by the setup wizard:
- DXMT — translates Direct3D 11 draw calls into Apple Metal API calls, so the game's GPU work runs fully native on your Apple Silicon chip rather than through a software emulation path.
- OpenXR VR runtime — a custom runtime that intercepts every VR frame the game submits and hands it to MoltenVR's streaming pipeline. Games call this runtime for head tracking, controller input, and haptics, just as they would call SteamVR on Windows.
Game libraries are discovered automatically. MoltenVR scans for Steam, BSManager (multi-version Beat Saber installs), and itch.io libraries and lists compatible titles on the Games screen.
Managed bottle vs. custom bottle
Managed Bottle (Recommended)
MoltenVR's built-in bottle manager uses WhiskyWine / GPTK under the hood — the same proven Wine build that powers the frankea Whisky fork. The setup wizard handles everything: it creates and configures the bottle, installs the DXMT graphics layer (Direct3D 11 → Metal translation), and registers the OpenXR runtime, each in a single click.
Once the wizard completes, the managed bottle is fully configured and ready to run VR games. No manual Wine tweaking is needed.
Custom Bottle (Existing Install)
If you already have games installed in a Whisky, CrossOver, or Wineskin bottle, MoltenVR can use that bottle instead of creating a new one. Supported bottle types:
| Bottle manager | Notes |
|---|---|
| Whisky (frankea fork) | github.com/frankea/Whisky — the recommended custom option |
| CrossOver | Commercial Wine wrapper by CodeWeavers |
| Wineskin | Community Wine wrapper for macOS |
The Minecraft exception
Further reading
For a deep dive into what a bottle is, how DXMT's D3D11 → Metal translation works, and how the MoltenVR OpenXR runtime fits into the stack, see the full PDF guide: