Apple has a Proton-like game porting toolkit for getting Windows games on your Mac – Ars Technica

There was so much packed into Apple’s WWDC presentation on Monday that it’s hard to believe there are still big chunks of it left to reveal. However, as part of its developer presentation, Apple quietly announced what could be major news for PC gaming on Macs — a Windows compatibility initiative like SteamOS, but for millions of Apple Silicon Macs instead of Steam Decks.

“Bring your game to your MacMore than three videos covering A Game controller guidea Game Transfer Toolkit (Apple developers only) and an adapter for making games shading Work with Apple’s hardware acceleration API. Apple claims that you have “everything you need to deliver an amazing gaming experience” with Apple-Silicon-based Macs and that its suite of tools provides an “emulated environment to run an existing, unmodified Windows game”.

“It doesn’t take months to get to know the look, sounds, and gameplay of your game,” Aiswariya Sreenivassan, Apple’s technical project manager, says in the introduction to the video. “You see the potential of your game right away.”

At the core of Apple’s game porting toolkit is CodeWeavers’ CrossOver open source code. CodeWeavers writes on their site that: The company is “high” that Apple “recognizes that Wine is a great solution for running Windows games on MacOS.” CodeWeavers has not worked with Apple on this tool, but we’d be happy to work with any game developers’ who would like to work with the company. PortJump Team To improve localization from Windows to Mac.

This may be the best situation out there for CodeWeavers, as just last week the company announced a DirectX-to-Metal and Windows-to-Mac translation tool in CrossOver Mac version 23 this summer. CodeWeavers’ Own post on its API ambitions Note that get Diablo II resurrected Running on an Apple M2 chip required “many bugs” to be fixed and he expected this kind of scenario for other Win-to-Mac games. It remains to be seen how Apple’s implementation of CrossOver code differs in processing and translation.

Apple’s demo shows a relatively new and recent game, average, transferred from Windows to Mac Metal. API calls to Windows DirectX 12 are translated to Metal, and input, audio, network, file, and other system calls are brought over to their macOS counterparts. like Spotted by The Vergerepairmen reddit already loaded Cyberpunk 2077 movie And Diablo IV On Apple devices, hours after the arrival of the Apple Toolkit. You can see how quickly you can get a Windows game to run on your Mac — and you can see its frosty speed.

Apple chips can do some amazing things, but compared to the latest Intel and AMD chips that do gaming-related work, they’re more energy efficient than performance. As detailed in our review of the M2-Pro-powered Mac Mini, the 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, its performance is “good”. While it’s hard to make direct comparisons given all the variables and architectures at play, you can compare Apple’s graphics performance to a modern Ryzen integrated GPU, at least for the base M1 and M2 chips. The Apple Pro, Max, and Ultra chips will be faster, but they’re only used in very expensive Macs.

Even this can be a great boon for gamers looking for something –anything-Like the active gaming system on their Mac. Valve’s Steam Deck is a miracle of Linux compatibility, even if most of the newer games have to run at lower resolutions, frame rates, and graphics settings. Many Deck fans are more than willing to trade off ray tracing and Ultra settings for the convenience of gaming wherever they please. Apple’s toolkit and CodeWeavers’ own work suggest that Mac owners may soon be indulging in this kind of trade-off.

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