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Apple
There was so much packed into Apple’s WWDC presentation on Monday that it’s hard to believe there are still huge chunks of it left to discover. However, as part of a developer presentation, Apple quietly announced what could be major news for PC games on Mac hardware—its own SteamOS-like Windows compatibility initiative, but for millions of Apple Silicon Macs instead of Steam Decks.
“Bring your game to the Mac” is laid out in three videos covering a game controller guidea Game Porting Toolkit (Apple developers only), and a converter for making games shaders work with Apple’s Metal hardware acceleration API. Apple says “you have everything you need to deliver an amazing gaming experience” on Apple-Silicon-based Macs and its toolkit provides “an emulation environment to run your existing, not modified Windows game.”
“It doesn’t take months to understand how your game looks, sounds, and plays,” said Aiswariya Sreenivassan, technical project manager at Apple, in the video introduction. “You immediately see the potential of your game.”
At the core of Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is CodeWeavers’ open source code for CrossOver. CodeWeavers writes on its site that the company is “delightful” that Apple “recognizes that Wine is a fantastic solution for running Windows games on MacOS.” CodeWeavers “didn’t work with Apple on this tool, but we’d be happy to work with any game developers” who want to work with the company PortJump Team to refine their Windows-to-Mac translation.
That might be the best stance CodeWeavers can take, because last week, the company announced its own DirectX-to-Metal, Windows-games-to-Mac translation tool coming to CrossOver Mac version 23 this summer. CodeWeavers’ own post on its API ambitions acquisition has already been mentioned Diablo II Resurrected which runs on an Apple M2 chip needs fixing “numerous bugs” and that it expects that kind of scenario for other Win-to-Mac games. It remains to be seen how Apple’s implementation of CrossOver code handling and translation will differ.
Apple’s demonstration shows a relatively new and modern game, The Medium, which was ported from Windows to Mac Metal. Windows DirectX 12 API calls are translated to Metal, and input, audio, network, file, and other system calls are ported to their macOS counterparts. Count spotted by The VergeReddit tinkerers already have load up Cyberpunk 2077 and Diablo IV on Apple hardware, some time after Apple’s Toolkit arrived. You’ll see how fast a Windows game can run on a Mac—and you’ll see its honey-warm speed.
Apple’s chips can do some amazing things, but compared to the latest Intel and AMD chips that do gaming-related work, they’re more efficient than performance. As detailed in our review of the M2-Pro-powered Mac Mini, M-series chips are optimized for efficiency rather than peak performance, whether they’re in a fanless laptop or a high-end desktop. Next to similar x86 chips, their performance is “fine.” While it’s hard to make direct comparisons because of all the variables and architecture at play, you can compare Apple’s graphics performance to a modern integrated Ryzen GPU, at least for the baseline M1 and M2 chips. Apple’s Pro, Max, and Ultra chips will be faster, but only used in more expensive Macs.
Although that can be a wonderful boon for players looking for something—anything-such as an active game ecosystem on their Mac. Valve’s Steam Deck is a miracle of Linux-powered compatibility, though for most newer games, it should run them at lower resolutions, frame rates, and graphics settings. Many Deck fans prefer to trade the ray-tracing and Ultra settings for the convenience of playing where they want. Apple’s toolkit, and CodeWeavers’ own work, suggests that Mac owners may be indulging in that kind of trade-off soon.
Apple’s image list