With the introduction of its upcoming macOS Sonoma operating system at this year’s WWDC, Apple also debuted its new Game Porting Tool that allows developers to easily port their Windows games to the Mac with little or no effort. The tool, which is still a beta, received a significant update this week, and could potentially turn the macOS into a more viable contender as a gaming platform.
Apple’s Game Porting tool, which is based on Wine, offers a means of readily translating Windows software to Unix environments (such as macOS and Linux). However, Apple’s version features numerous improvements compared to the original Wine build, such as being able to translate DirectX 12 to Metal 3 in real-time. After using Game Porting Tool to test a Windows game on macOS, developers can use new tools to convert DirectX graphics to Metal. As a result, the game can run natively with much better performance.
The Game porting Tool is aimed at developers and anyone who can operate the Terminal program to try out Windows games on the Mac. The updated Game Porting Toolkit, which reached beta 1.0.2 this week, offers improved game performance. According to YouTuber Andrew Tsai, who ran tests with the new version, he was able to notice that games are running at higher frame rates.
With the new version, the frame rate when running the popular game Elden Ring has gone up from 26 frames per second to 32 frames per second on a Mac powered by the M1 Max chip. When running Cyberpunk on a M2 Ultra Mac, the average frames per second went from 8 FPS to 18 FPS.
Oddly enough, the Game Porting Tool has some compatibility issues with Apple’s M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra chip, as the same games perform better on less powerful chips. This could be due to the fact that the Ultra chips combine two Max chips into one with UltraFusion technology, so perhaps the tool doesn’t yet have full support for it.
Via the M1 Max, Cyberpunk runs at 40 FPS, while some games that were not compatible with the tool before like Horizon Zero Dawn and Resident Evil 2 now work just fine. The new version of the Game Porting Tool adds support for 32-bit software, although the performance seems pretty bad for now.
Apple’s Game Porting Tool is currently designed for developers to test their games and gauge whether they’re worth porting to the Mac. For users interested in testing it, the tool can be downloaded via Apple’s Developer website and installed by running some Terminal commands. The software only works on Apple Silicon Macs running the latest macOS Sonoma beta, which is available exclusively to developers. A public beta will be released this month, while the official release is scheduled for this fall.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via 9to5Mac and developer.apple.com