Apple finally takes gaming seriously with new MacOS tool to port Windows games over

During this year’s WWDC, Apple’s hardware announcements such as the Vision Pro, 15-inch MacBook Air and M2 Ultra processor may have garnered all the headlines, but one new piece of software from them that went a little under the radar might actually be a huge game changer. Cupertino has announced a new Game Porting Toolkit that will hopefully be able to port Windows games over to Mac easier and quick than ever before.

Similar to what Valve did by developing the Proton compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux (and its own SteamOS on the Steam Deck), Apple has created the Game Porting Toolkit by basing it on the source code from CrossOver, another Wine-based tool that was already around for MacOS users to run Windows games. Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit means that for game developers at least, they can just use the tool to run a made-for-Windows version of their game first to gauge how well it runs on a Mac.

Perhaps the most impressive part though is that the Game Porting Toolkit also comes with support for DirectX12 API. The toolkit will convert these Windows API calls into its own Metal API, translate all the x86 instructions for Apple Silicon and all the necessary APIs for control input, audio and more for MacOS. This could finally be one way to see just how well Apple’s GPU performs in gaming; Cupertino often boasts high performance numbers but without many supported titles it’s always been hard to tell where it stood against traditional PC hardware.

If you’re still not convinced, well, someone on the r/macgaming subreddit just managed to get Cyberpunk 2077—a notoriously tough game to run—on their M1-powered MacBook Pro 13. Not just that, but they got it running at 15FPS while using the Ultra preset albeit at a slightly lower resolution.

I got Cyberpunk 2077 running on an M1 MacBook!
by u/isaa6 in macgaming

You can find out more about Apple’s efforts to bring games to MacOS over on the Apple Developer website here.