"Game Porting Toolkit" by Apple will allow Windows games to run on Mac, similar to Proton on Linux

Apple-Game-Porting-Toolkit-800x420.jpg

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.

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"The Medium" running on a Mac OS device through the "Game Porting Toolkit" by Apple
Aiswariya Sreenivassan said:
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.

:arrow: Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)
:arrow: Source
 

jpx86

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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.
No idea where you heard that. Steam works fine on m1 macs.
 

Ampersound

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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
Proton is pretty good though. Did that Bioshock Infinite port use proton, a different version of wine or something else entirely?
 

squeakycleanswine

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macOS finally getting some love after all these years! though if I didn't already have a steam deck I feel like I would be more excited than I am right now.
 

diggeloid

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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.
My understanding is that this is really just a straight port of Wine/Proton, but with a DirectX-to-Metal translation layer developed from scratch by Apple (like DxVK). Games would run in their existing Rosetta translation layer thing, so performance is going to be limited. Maybe the Mac Pro will be competitive (in performance, not price) with a dedicated Linux or Windows PC with a old-ish AMD or Nvidia GPU.

They're pitching this as a developer tool to evaluate the amount of work involved in porting your game to Metal. AFAIK Apple doesn't want developers to use this to do the actual port. They want devs to add a Metal backend to their engines and use first party APIs. Idk if they'll even accept appstore submissions built on this.

...which all seems very stupid to me. Why go through all of the effort to implement something like this? If they want to motivate devs to port their games to Mac, they should release (and support) official Vulkan and OpenGL drivers. The value proposition of Metal would be for optimizing and using unique features. I don't see why they're obsessed with getting people to use Metal, since it makes no difference to the end user, and it's not going to lock any devs into their ecosystem since most engines are built to accommodate multiple backends.
 
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Foxi4

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My understanding is that this is really just a straight port of Wine/Proton, but with a DirectX-to-Metal translation layer developed from scratch by Apple (like DxVK). Games would run in their existing Rosetta translation layer thing, so performance is going to be limited. Maybe the Mac Pro will be competitive (in performance, not price) with a dedicated Linux or Windows PC with a old-ish AMD or Nvidia GPU.

They're pitching this as a developer tool to evaluate the amount of work involved in porting your game to Metal. AFAIK Apple doesn't want developers to use this to do the actual port. They want devs to add a Metal backend to their engines and use first party APIs. Idk if they'll even accept appstore submissions built on this.

...which all seems very stupid to me. Why go through all of the effort to implement something like this? If they want to motivate devs to port their games to Mac, they should release (and support) official Vulkan and OpenGL drivers. The value proposition of Metal would be for optimizing and using unique features. I don't see why they're obsessed with getting people to use Metal, since it makes no difference to the end user, and it's not going to lock any devs into their ecosystem since most engines are built to accommodate multiple backends.
Right, so they’re effectively taking pre-existing software, adapting it to the UNIX-like environment of Mac OS, adding a sprinkle of API and re-packaging into an all-in-one solution? I don’t think I have a problem with that so long as it’s free to use by anyone interested in porting their software. Adopting more universal standards would be nice, but it runs contrary to the Apple business model. They’re not selling you on a particular device, they’re selling you an ecosystem.
 

codezer0

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No idea where you heard that. Steam works fine on m1 macs.
One of the big threads on Steam forums was how once couldn't even launch, install or run steam at all on Mac OS Catalina, which was the first build of the OS to be able to recognize and work on those systems. It went on for a while with a lot of "me too" comments, far more than I expected to see.

Apple, being Apple, abjectly refused to even acknowledge a problem with the behavior.
 

ChaoticPumpkin

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Let's see how that goes, shall we? At least it will run better than Wine on Linux.
It seems to mainly be built on top a wine. Also, at least from my experience, Valve’s fork of wine works pretty good with a lot of games. It’s not perfect, but they have done a lot for both wine and the Linux community in general.
 
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SuperSVGA

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One of the big threads on Steam forums was how once couldn't even launch, install or run steam at all on Mac OS Catalina, which was the first build of the OS to be able to recognize and work on those systems. It went on for a while with a lot of "me too" comments, far more than I expected to see.

Apple, being Apple, abjectly refused to even acknowledge a problem with the behavior.
That's because Catalina dropped support for 32-bit applications. Catalina does not support Apple Silicon.
 

jpx86

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One of the big threads on Steam forums was how once couldn't even launch, install or run steam at all on Mac OS Catalina, which was the first build of the OS to be able to recognize and work on those systems. It went on for a while with a lot of "me too" comments, far more than I expected to see.

Apple, being Apple, abjectly refused to even acknowledge a problem with the behavior.
Ah. I didn't immediately upgrade so maybe that is why I never had issues.
 

Nincompoopdo

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There's a rumour a while back - that Apple is developing a handheld console similar to Switch or Steamdeck.

This could be a preparation for that console. Imagine M2 ARM chip in a handheld, it's desktop class chip but using power like a smartphone chip.
 

The Catboy

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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.
This incorrect. Steam runs just fine on the M-series Mac due to Rosetta 2. I would know because I am running steam on my M2 MacBook
 

Pickle_Rick

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Let's see how that goes, shall we? At least it will run better than Wine on Linux.
Doubt it. Considering how well Proton works. Also Metal is missing a bunch of functionality present in Vulkan and DX12. You won't be able to 1:1 translate the calls so that's going to add a bunch of overhead that something like DXVK doesn't have.
 
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Latiodile

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Proton is pretty good though. Did that Bioshock Infinite port use proton, a different version of wine or something else entirely?
I wasn't talking about proton, I was talking about the original Linux port which used some shitty in-house translation layer, which is why steam defaults to proton rather than the native Linux version
 

Latiodile

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Is it possible to run Windows or Linux games on a Mac anyway? Not a Mac user, so don't know.
before apple silicon (and after powerpc) you could use bootcamp to install windows/linux on a mac via either dualboot or single boot. i have a mac mini from 2007 that has just windows 7 on it
 

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