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Apple’s macOS has never been a major player in gaming. Sure, there have been some games available for the Mac, but any serious PC gamers use Windows machines. You may have more choices soon. At WWDC this week, Apple unveiled a new tool that makes it easier to run Windows games on macOS. In the same way tools like Proton can run Windows games on Linux, Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit translates Windows code to run on the Mac.
Calling this a “Game Porting Toolkit” implies that developers use it to port games, but that’s not quite right. The Game Porting Toolkit is actually an emulation engine powered by the open-source CrossOver project (which is based on Wine). With this toolkit, you can load a Windows game in macOS on the fly, and all those Windows API calls and x86 instructions will be translated to the Apple Metal API and Apple silicon instructions. It even works on the latest DirectX 12 titles, according to Apple’s WWDC session.
Technically, this is still a developer tool. Apple intends for the Game Porting Toolkit to help devs evaluate games before porting them to run natively on macOS, and it could provide valuable data. All the API calls for input devices, audio playback, network management, and file access are ported over to the corresponding APIs in macOS. This can help developers work out the kinks in a port, but there’s no reason gamers can’t install the toolkit to play unmodified Windows games.
Just because you can use the toolkit to doesn’t mean you’ll want to, though. Apple always talks up the graphical performance of its custom M-series chips, but modern games can’t take full advantage via the toolkit. An emulated game won’t perform as well as a native one, and the early results bear that out. Apple has made the toolkit available for the new macOS Sonoma beta, allowing gamers to see what Windows games can do on Apple’s hardware. Mac fans have managed to get games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring running via the Game Porting Toolkit, but framerates are on the low end of playable. Although, a test with the M1 Max running Diablo IV easily stays above 60fps.
This won’t immediately open the floodgates to Windows games on macOS, but it does eliminate some excuses developers use for skipping the Mac. Maybe the Game Porting Toolkit will even get good enough one day that macOS users can just run Windows games without waiting for a port.
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