Apple's GamePortingToolkit makes it easy to get Windows games on Mac, but Apple didn't talk about the fact that it could enable thousands of games right away.
This story is part of our complete Apple WWDC coverage Apple really wants developers to port their games to Mac, going as far as to book Hideo Kojima for a cameo during WWDC 2023 and announcing the Game Porting Toolkit. However, the most significant related development didn’t come during the keynote. It came afterwards, during the Platform State of the Union.
DirectX 12 is Microsoft’s Application Programming Interface for graphics. It basically translates all the instructions of a game and sends them to your graphics card. Macs, in the past, haven’t been able to understand these instructions, which is why you can’t run DirectX 12 games though a tool like Parallels. Bit just days before WWDC, CrossOver — a compatibility layer for Windows Apps like Linux, macOS, and ChromeOS — got its first DirectX 12 game working: Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Apple says the Game Porting Toolkit can translate controller inputs, audio and graphics APIs, CPU instructions, and other APIs automatically. The company demoed how this works in practice, where you simply import a Windows game and launch it through a command line, and the translation automatically happens inside Apple’s emulation environment.
The part Apple left out is that it published the Game Porting Toolkit under an open-source license. Anyone is free to take it and add it to their own applications. As Andrew Tsai, a YouTuber who covers gaming on Mac, says, the open-source license “is literally a game-changer.” The YouTuber continued: “The emulation and translation of Windows/DirectX 12 titles could potentially be integrated into something like Wine, and do for CrossOver what Proton has done for the Steam Deck.
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