Success with Mac M1, crossover 21.1 and macOS Monterey 12.0.1

[Tralfazz]

Great report, Windolin! Thank you for all the detail. I'm sure it will help other people.

1. Install Steam pre-configured bottle in Crossover (this results in (Windows 7 64bit)
2. In the Wine configuration of the new bottle: Selected Windows version 8.1

Installing from Steam is fine but I think you meant you used the Crossover Crosstie.

This is fine for now but in the future you might need to create a new Windows 10 64-bit bottle. That's why I recommend doing that from the beginning instead of letting the automated "Crosstie" set up a different type of bottle for you.

2. Install LOTRO from Steam (didn't select the high textures)

The high-resolution textures are about 10gb more to download so that's OK if you're in a rush to get done for some reason. Otherwise, you'll enjoy the game a lot more with the high-resolution textures. I recommend you install them at your earliest convenience.

3. In the LOTRO launcher, selected the 64bit client

The checkboxes in the LOTRO launcher application can be used but since, when running on a Mac using any version of WINE (including Crossover's version), the check marks don't show it can be hard to know if you have successfully enabled an option or not. I'm glad this worked for you but because of the checkmarks not showing whether an option is enabled or not, I always recommend editing the UserPreferences.ini file directly. The LOTRO launcher application always reads its settings from UserPreferences.ini even if you are using the 64-bit client. Only the 64-bit client reads its settings from UserPreferences64.ini, the 32-bit client and the LOTRO launcher application read their settings from UserPreferences.ini.

5. Inside the game: Enabled Vertical sync. I left it as Full Screen.

VSync synchronizes the output of the LOTRO client engine to your monitor's refresh rate. This does not improve performance; quite the opposite, in fact, although it can help to resolve some issues such as "screen tearing". VSync should not be enabled unless trying to work around some problem like that. Allow your FPS to float as needed, cap it in the OPTIONS->TROUBLESHOOT section of the in-game options if you want to help your computer to run a bit cooler or prevent visual artifacts which sometimes result from FPS bouncing around from very high to very low values as you move around the game world.

- I've read the LOTRO is a single core app, but when viewing the CPU and GPU History it's using 4 cores at around 50-80% and the GPU at around 80-90%.

I'd like to see this. It's not impossible that you're getting some benefit from Rosetta2 translation. It might be treating 4 of your SOC cores as a single core. But the LOTRO client is not a multithreaded application so it can't use more than a single physical core of a CPU. I have no Apple SOC Mac of my own to generate such reports or run such tests myself. You have made me very curious about this!

- ALT-TAB is VERY slow, takes about 10-15 seconds to reach the desktop.

If you change your screen mode from FULL SCREEN to FULL SCREEN WINDOWED you will get instant response to commands to change focus to another application or to move to a different virtual desktop space. Before Crossover 21, attempts to change focus to another application from LOTRO with the game in Full Screen mode would result in an inability to bring focus back to the LOTRO client, necessitating a force quit and relaunch of the game.