Windows-games porting made easy with Apple

Elden Ring on a MacBook Air. Credit YouTube/Andrew Tsai.

At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple announced the launch of an environment that makes it easier and faster to port Windows games to macOS. It is a toolkit not unlike Valve’s Proton project for the Steam Deck console. It uses CodeWeavers’ CrossOver code, a solution based on Wine that runs Windows games on macOS. “The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac,” explains Aiswariya Sreenivassan, project manager at Apple. This emulator adapts Intel x86 instructions and Windows APIs on the fly. APIs related to input/output devices, networking, file system, and Direct3D get translated to the corresponding macOS APIs. The toolkit contains a Metal Shader Converter that automatically converts HLSL GPU shaders to the Metal version. Apple also introduced a game mode in macOS Sonoma (OS 14) that marshalls more hardware resources for games in progress.

It mentioned that the emulation, which detects performance issues and bugs, is really meant to evaluate games before they’re ported to macOS, but nothing’s stopping you from installing the Game Porting Toolkit to test-run the games. As a matter of fact, some users were able to run Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV, and many others.

⇨ YouTube, “The Mac gaming DirectX 12 Revolution is NOW!”

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Apple’s new Proton-like tool can run Windows games on a Mac.”

⇨ Tom’s Guide, Roland Moore-Colyer, “Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit could be a revolution for Mac gaming — here’s the proof.”

2023-06-07