2023-06-15 14:42:16
Play on Mac has been a difficult experience for decades, so until a certain time ago, if you wanted to run AAA games, you would need to use a PC (usually Windows). This, however, was not strictly out of disinterest of the Appleas the company has made attempts to bring desktop gaming to Macs — yet nothing has really pushed that forward… possibly until now.
No macOS Sonoma 14which will be released later this year, Apple will introduce the game modewhich will automatically give games maximum CPU priorityCentral processing unitor central processing unit.”>1 by GPUsGraphics processing unitor graphics processing unit.”>2 Mac, reducing the consumption of these resources by other tasks. Additionally, Apple claims this will drastically reduce the latency of wireless accessories such as AirPods and game controllers.
In addition to this new function, the company also has a “secret weapon” to bring games from PCs to Macs: support for the DirectX 12 — an APIApplication programming interfaceor application programming interface.”>3 used especially for game programming on Windows, comparable to Apple’s Metal API.
More precisely, Apple has added DirectX 12 support through something it’s calling Game Porting Toolkita tool that allows developers to check how their games (compatible with DirectX 12) work on Macs with Apple chips — and that’s how the company will be able to change the reputation of games on their machines once and for all.
As detailed in a matter of Inversethis toolkit works largely as a “shortcut” of 20,000 lines of code to Wine, a platform designed to support Windows games on systems such as Linux, BSD, and macOS. A brief context: Wine is mainly sponsored by the company CodeWeavers, which also has a commercial version of the tool called CrossOver — which will even support DirectX 12 for games on Mac — which works by converting system calls made to Windows APIs into versions that can be used by other operating systems.
In this way, the Game Porting Toolkit simplifies a process that might otherwise be overly complicated and unexciting. With zero need to modify any code, a universe of games — including AAA — will be able to run on Macs with Apple Silicon almost like a native.
Naturally, enthusiasts and game developers have started experimenting with the new toolkit, and some content shared across the web shows truly remarkable results.
On a MacBook Pro com chip M2 Maxfor example, the game Diablo IV runs at almost 90 frames per second (frames per second) in the “Ultra” setting in its default resolution — already in a MacBook Pro com chip M1 Max, the title clocks in at 60fps at 1080p. By way of comparison, on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 card, the game can run at 90fps at 4K on “Ultra”.
While gaming performance varies by machine title and processor power—the M1 chips in the 13-inch MacBooks Air and Pro don’t perform as well as the M2 Max/Ultra chips in high-end Macs, for example — Apple engineers have of course tested some of the most popular games with this toolkit on a variety of devices in order to support all Apple Silicon machines.
More than that, the indie developer community has begun to adopt ways to make it easier for everyday users to take advantage of the Game Porting Toolkit with utilities like Whiskywith which you can create and manage, install and run Windows apps and games, and unlock the full potential of your Mac without the need for technical knowledge.
Of course, only time will tell if Apple’s latest efforts will ultimately help inject more gaming buzz to Macs; anyway, the prognoses are quite positive.
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