Last month during Apple’s WWDC event, the company unveiled a brand new gaming mode in macOS Sonoma with the hope of providing a better gaming experience. Aside from that, they introduced a new game porting toolkit designed to make it simpler and faster for game developers to launch DirectX 12 Windows games on MacOS.
Apple in gaming
When it comes to gaming, Windows is still the top choice for the majority of gamers who play using their computers. Apple has been trying to change this, and the new toolkit is just an example. The company uses “Wine”, a well-known open-source program from CodeWeavers, to build the emulator of the toolkit. This allows the Windows software to run more smoothly on Unix-based devices like macOS and Linux.
With this toolkit, developers will have the opportunity to experience the unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac. By doing so, they will be able to evaluate and compare the performance of the games on both platforms. According to the company, porting the game to the Mac will improve the overall experience as it allows the players to make use of its advanced features.
The toolkit
The toolkit also gives the developers a chance to easily access the visual features of the game and quickly modify them to take advantage of Apple’s Silicon performance. This plays a significant role in cutting down the overall development time. Apple made this new porting toolkit available on GitHub with an open-source license. This license gives an indication that both old and new Windows games can soon be ported to Mac.
Witness the fusion of gaming and technology with Diablo IV on Mac! The Apple M1 Ultra chip flexes its muscle against ARM64 to X86-64, while the Apple game porting toolkit masterfully transitions Direct-X 12 to Apple Metal, all at a smooth 60+fps. It's a thrilling display of the… pic.twitter.com/PnTDXPlcNV
— Stefan Hamann 🛒 👾 🎮 (@stefan_hamann) June 12, 2023
Although the toolkit was created for testing purposes, it may not be suitable for users to port the Mac versions of games like Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk 2077. The main reason is that these games push those power-efficient processors on Mac computers to the absolute limit, causing performance problems and bug-related issues.
Since its announcement, Apple’s new game porting toolkit has received all the attention and praise it deserves from both developers and large gaming communities. Porting Windows games to Mac involves a lot of challenging procedures and is usually time-consuming for developers. With the launch of the new toolkit, it will now be easy for them to optimize the Windows games to run natively on Mac desktops and laptops.
Photo credit: All images shown are owned by Apple and were made available as part of a press release.
