Incredible but true: finally, it will soon be much easier to run Windows games on macOS.
Apple took advantage of WWDC 2023 to announce the development of an environment similar to Proton, making it much less stressful for developers to port Windows games to Mac.
The perennial problem of porting Windows games to Mac relegated to the past
“ Will we one day be entitled to a port of X game Windows on Mac? is probably the question that has most burned the lips of gamers on Apple devices for years. Everything comes at the right time to who knows how to wait, with the arrival of a toolkit soberly called “Game Porting Toolkit” and dedicated to this exercise.
In addition to crazy announcements during this WWDC around the Vision Pro, the new Mac Pro, macOS Sonoma and iOS 17, among others, it is certainly this one that will please gamers loyal to the Apple brand the most. . Inspired by Valve’s work on the Steam Deck with Proton, this toolkit intends to instantly translate Windows games (even those under DirectX 12) to run them on macOS.
” The Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment for running existing unmodified Windows games, and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics features and performance potential of your game on Mac explained Aiswariya Srinivasan, graphics hardware engineer at Apple, during WWDC.
How this famous Game Porting Toolkit works
For a more concrete explanation, Apple’s toolkit translates instructions from Intel x86 and Windows APIs to adapt them to Silicon. Translated APIs include both keyboard and mouse or gamepad controls, as well as audio, network, a given game’s system or Direct3D. All this is then adapted to the corresponding macOS APIs.
This makes it possible, practically in the blink of an eye, to run Windows games on Apple’s operating system, without having to suffer the headache of modifying them. Currently, however, the Game Porting Toolkit is mainly there to judge the performance of a Windows game running on macOS.
However, this does not prevent the curious from trying the tool for themselves. However, optimization problems should be expected, as Apple’s solution is still in its infancy. For the porting of Windows games on macOS to be done in the most optimal way, it will indeed be necessary that the developers still get their hands dirty.
That being said, this is a giant leap from the Cupertino company when it comes to its community of players. ” Not too soon some might say.
Source : Apple
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