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Apple just had its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week, and during said conference, they announced a very interesting development aimed for gaming on Mac devices, with the introduction of their new "Game Porting Toolkit", which seems to be aimed directly to game developers wishing to bring their game natively into Apple systems.

It's been well known for decades that if you wanted to do any kind of gaming in a Personal Computer, your only option would most likely be Windows, and one of its many versions depending on which game you wanted to play in it. However, in the last couple of years, this landscape for PCs has changed dramatically, as the introduction to the public of SteamOS and Proton by Valve now allows playing even the most recent AAA titles under Linux machines, thanks to the implementation of Proton. Proton's a fork of Wine, which allows running Windows applications under Linux environments, and with Valve's fork, a lot of the configuration hurdles to run DirectX (and other things) has been streamlined and made much easier to the end-user.

In a similar way, Apple's new "Game Porting Toolkit" translation layer aims to make playing on Mac OS devices a possibility, allowing the latest DirectX12 games to run on Mac OS, by utilizing "CrossOver" (also Wine-based, similar to Proton). Apple even demonstrated the toolkit by running "The Medium" using Apple's new translation layer.

"The Medium" running on a Mac OS device through the "Game Porting Toolkit" by Apple
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The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac,...

It's worth noting however, that this toolkit is aimed exclusively to gaming developers themselves to work on ports of their games. No gaming company or developer can include the toolkit when shipping their game. Consequentially, Apple would also need to constantly keep up and support updates to the toolkit as more and more titles are being released. Other games have also been able to run on MacOS, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Diablo IV, through the tinkering of Reddit users with the toolkit. Those willing to take a peek at the toolkit require an Apple Developer account to do so.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)
Source

 

[SylverReZ]

Let's see how that goes, shall we? I highly doubt it'd be successful.

 

[TheStonedModder]

Cool idea. Shitty execution locking it behind a dev account.

It’s just a needless paywall

 

[ShadowOne333]

Cool idea. Shitty execution locking it behind a dev account.

It’s just a needless paywall

That's how you know it's Apple-made.
inb4 $500 to run Windows games on Mac.

Edit: I am aware it doesn't require payment to access it, but nevertheless, it's still dev-oriented and not user-oriented.

 

[maddin]

It's actually not behind a paywall. You just need your Apple ID to download and use the Game Porting Toolkit.
Source: Andrew Tsai just uploaded a video talking about it and there's also a written guide on the Apple Gaming Wiki.

 

[dragonmaster]

Nah will pass apple and games does not fit in the same sentence

 

[eigenvector]

That's how you know it's Apple-made.
inb4 $500 to run Windows games on Mac.

I believe you don't need to pay anything to use the tooklit. People are already creating threads for the games that work out of the box. There's even a guide for those who want to try it themselves

 

[Noctosphere]

Noice. Now i almost want to buy an apple gaming pc...

 

[Latiodile]

inb4 it brings in a wave of terrible mac ports like the linux "port" of bioshock infinite where it's horrendously broken because it's an awful translation layer from windows to linux

 

[TheNintendoEnthusiast]

PKHex on Mac!! That's what I'd use this for!!

 

[SuperSVGA]

inb4 it brings in a wave of terrible mac ports like the linux "port" of bioshock infinite where it's horrendously broken because it's an awful translation layer from windows to linux

Depends on if the developers make any fixes I guess, I've noticed Proton at least has the same graphical glitches in certain games on both Linux and Mac.

 

[codezer0]

Okay, but, last I checked, every build of Mac os that was aware of running on that new arm based m1 chip and onwards, basically blocked steam from even installing, much less running.

If that's not been definitely fixed, this is as empty a gesture from apple as them claiming to use USB c on their new iphones to then use some ultra cursed, proprietary take on it.

 

[The Catboy]

That's how you know it's Apple-made.
inb4 $500 to run Windows games on Mac.

It’s actually free, same with the account needed to download it. You just need to login with your Apple ID to gain access

 

[Foxi4]

Okay, but, last I checked, every build of Mac os that was aware of running on that new arm based m1 chip and onwards, basically blocked steam from even installing, much less running.

If that's not been definitely fixed, this is as empty a gesture from apple as them claiming to use USB c on their new iphones to then use some ultra cursed, proprietary take on it.

I suspect Apple wants to maintain their walled garden, this is an investment on their part in an effort to expand the offering on the Apple App Store. They still don’t welcome competition on their platform.

 

[chrisrlink]

and portiing kit isn't a thing (grant it rosetta 2 is being used to run ports can't we just clean room this shit without apple code and release the built from scratch engine? i'm pretty sure it'll leak sooner or llater and an open source iimplimentation wi;ll be released btw cant Solo devs use this tooo or only studios?

 

[RichardTheKing]

I wonder if this could be used to run PKHeX on macOS...

 

[RHOPKINS13]

Apple garbage. Why split the community even more? Wine already runs on Mac, seems to me that more effort should be put into making Proton run on Mac. Otherwise I highly doubt that this "Game Porting Toolkit" will ever see the amount of progress Proton has.

 

[eyeliner]

So.... They took something free and used it? And also made it free?
What kind of Apple Computing Corp is this?

 

[ShadowOne333]

Apple garbage. Why split the community even more? Wine already runs on Mac, seems to me that more effort should be put into making Proton run on Mac. Otherwise I highly doubt that this "Game Porting Toolkit" will ever see the amount of progress Proton has.

It'd be interesting to see if their "toolkit" just flatout gives worse performance than Proton ported to Mac.

 

[Foxi4]

It'd be interesting to see if their "toolkit" just flatout gives worse performance than Proton ported to Mac.

Does Proton work cross-architecture? From what I understand, the porting kit allows for x86 applications to be ported (with relative ease) to Apple’s implementation of ARM, that’s the selling point here.