Apple Game Porting Tool for macOS its first update

Apple has introduced a 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, got its first update last week – and it's a big one. Read on as we detail what Apple has been doing to turn the Mac into a gaming platform.

For those unfamiliar, Apple's Game Porting Tool was announced at WWDC 2023 to help developers port Windows games to macOS. The tool is based on Wine, a popular open-source platform that translates Windows software to Unix environments (such as macOS and Linux).

However, Apple's version has a lot of improvements compared to the original Wine, 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.

Although Game Porting Tool is aimed at developers, anyone who knows how to use Terminal can try it out to run Windows games on Mac. And surprisingly, Apple has already released the first Game Porting Tool update, and it comes with a bunch of significant enhancements.

What's new with the update?

The Game Porting Toolkit beta 1.0.2 update significantly improves game performance. YouTuber Andrew Tsai has run some tests with the new version, and in most scenarios 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 Elder 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.

Interesting, it seems that 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.

With M1 Max, Cyberpunk runs at 40 FPS. At the same time, some games that were not compatible with the tool before like Horizon Zero Dawn and Resident Evil 2 now work just fine. Another intriguing detail is that the new version of the Game Porting Tool adds support for 32-bit software, but the performance seems pretty bad for now.