Apple introduced its Game Porting Toolkit at this week’s WWDC event. The software emulator is meant for testing and evaluation purposes to help game designers port Windows game titles, including DirectX12 titles, over to a Mac.
However, users have quickly discovered the Game Porting Toolkit can also be used to simply play Windows games without any porting or modification.
Already videos are spreading online of people running titles, including “Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered,” “Elden Ring.” and “Cyberpunk 2077” on Macs equipped with Apple Silicon (ie. M1 & M2 chips).
In fact, “Diablo IV” has reportedly been able to run at around 55-88 frames per second over the emulator. The toolkit is receiving comparisons to Valve’s Proton translation layer, which is how Valve’s Linux-based Steam Deck is able to run Windows games.
Apple hasn’t yet commented on whether it could make the emulator directly available to consumers. The upcoming release will need the upcoming macOS update Sonoma as a minimum requirement to run it.
The Toolkit is powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution that will instantly translate Intel-based x86 instructions and Windows APIs to run on Apple Silicon instead. There’s also a new Metal Shader Converter to automatically convert existing GPU shaders to work with Apple’s Metal API.
This allows developers to launch an unmodified Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting it over. The new system significantly cuts down the time and work to port games and early results look very promising despite some performance limitations.
Source: The Verge
