Apple has a new porting toolkit to run DirectX 12 games on macOS

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Forward-looking: Apple has seemingly had enough with all the memes about the Mac platform being the joke of the PC gaming world rather than a proper entertainment machine. Cupertino is finally providing some new tools to developers, promoting a quicker evaluation of what's needed to port a game to macOS.

This year's WWDC brought some interesting news for gamers and game developers alike. And no, we're not talking about the impossibly expensive Vision Pro AR headset or some "interactive" AR gaming toy. This time, Apple is providing developers with a Game Porting Toolkit to make macOS gaming an actual business opportunity.

The new toolkit includes a compatibility layer which programmers, or even gamers, can use to run DirectX 12 games in a macOS environment. The toolkit's code is based on Proton, which is the Wine-based compatibility layer developed by Valve to run Windows games on Linux operating systems. It is also rooted in the source code of CodeWeavers' CrossOver, which is already developing its own compatibility layer to run DX 12 games on Mac.

The Game Porting Toolkit can translate x86 native code to the Apple Silicon platform, intercepting and converting API calls for 3D graphics to Mac's proprietary Metal API. Furthermore, the toolkit translates inputs, audio, networking and everything else that's needed to load a Windows game on Apple's new Arm-based chips. Running and enjoying said game with decent performance, however, is an entirely different matter.

Cupertino introduced its game toolkit as an evaluation tool for game developers, a quick and (somewhat) easy way to "just run" a Windows game on a Mac to see if the game can actually run, what the performance expectations are, and to determine what's needed to further optimize the experience and actually sell the game to end users. The Game Porting Toolkit can also convert existing (Windows) GPU shaders to the Metal API through a dedicated Metal Shader Converter.

The Game Porting Toolkit is an evaluation environment first and foremost, but users are already employing the tool to try and run the latest Windows games on their Arm Macs.

Users on Reddit have tried Apple's official compatibility layer to load Cyberpunk 2077 on an M1 MacBook, Diablo IV on an M1 Max MacBook Pro, and Hogwarts Legacy on an M2 Max. The experience isn't exactly lightning-fast or bug-free, but these first results of the newly released Game Porting Toolkit look promising to say the least.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/99012-apple-has-new-porting-toolkit-run-directx-12.html

 

[m4a4]

It's not all that promising at the moment (looking at Apple) if you read the TOS. They explicitly state that you can't use it for commercial reasons.
So, at best it's just another step for the end user to maybe be able to play a game (if they're tech literate enough). Which, is nice and all, but I don't see it getting the type of support the Steam Deck's compatibility layer is getting. Might as well jump over to Linux at that point.

It just feels like the bare minimum Apple can do at the moment (which isn't surprising considering their history with gaming).

 

[Dimitriid]

Well I have to say that relatively recently, Valve convinced me that it is actually viable to just work on compatibility as a way out of Windows so it shows us at least that it can be done. Whenever or not it can be done by Apple however is another thing: Mostly because a couple things:

1) They honestly don't seem to have the will to bet really big on it. They've got the cash but they've found an incredibly nice profit streams from Apps and as a cold, calculating corporation, why would they be moving in the opposite direction of what all game companies wish they could have which is the low effort, high reward and margin from Apple's App store so Apple from a business logic perspective, is not going to say 'Yeah we want the far less profitable and more risky business of AAA videogames'

They could go after that market if there was not much left to grab from the mobile app world but it is clearly not the case yet.

2) Apple's policies of tight control and little customization doesn't works for compatibility layers. Just think about trying to do what Valve did with Wine/Proton but without open source, without a small but eager community of Linux gamers willing to test and even contribute to the project and not only that but having it work the Apple way meaning you can't just start editing ini files, rolling back to different versions, playing around with different drivers, etc. All the things that are needed to eventually figure out what works and make sure Proton configures known-to-work settings as defaults and such but instead just Apple having to do everything by themselves and still have most games ported and just work.

So given both points I would say that Apple will continue to do just about the bare minimum to claim they're not ignoring AAA gaming while in actuality, you will not be actually finding even a small percentage of PC games, past present or future ones, being playable on macos.

 

[ferrellsl]

It's not all that promising at the moment (looking at Apple) if you read the TOS. They explicitly state that you can't use it for commercial reasons.
So, at best it's just another step for the end user to maybe be able to play a game (if they're tech literate enough). Which, is nice and all, but I don't see it getting the type of support the Steam Deck's compatibility layer is getting. Might as well jump over to Linux at that point.

It just feels like the bare minimum Apple can do at the moment (which isn't surprising considering their history with gaming).

Other articles have stated that the tool is based on Wine, hence no commercial use.

 

[Watzupken]

I feel this is promising. But knowing Apple, it is not going to take off because they can't be bothered.

 

[dangh]

Other articles have stated that the tool is based on Wine, hence no commercial use.

Wine have nothing against commercial use, it is free for individuals and companies. It's apple that can't charge money for it simply limits its use to sell other options or just keep the garden walled in areas where they could not gain monies...

 

[human7]

I hope they are successful. If they can make something that lets you run nearly any Windows game on a Mac with near-Windows performance on similar hardware, that would be excellent. Microsoft could use some more competition to improve their OS (particularly as it relates to the user experience, privacy, etc.), and Apple would be able to exert that pressure. I don't use Apple products (I don't like to be in walled gardens), but I can't deny that Apple excels at providing a unified, consistent, easy to use, and privacy centric experience to its users. It's not perfect (nothing is), but it would be great to see that kind of foe to Microsoft enter the gaming world seriously. Yes, there's Linux, and there has been a lot of great work there, but there's a long ways to go still.

 

[torchyear]

This kind of solution is probably good enough for their market. Macs have never catered for the primary gamer market, even in its Intel Boot Camp days. It's more promising for the secondary 'casual' gamers within its existing customer base. If it can bring in more casual games into its app store via a dev tool, then it's more revenue for all involved through this channel.