Apple has announced a new tool to translate games coded for Windows to MacOS, much like Valve's Proton, a compatibility layer for Steam Deck, or the more common Wine for Linux, already in Apple's in-house silicon. It is already being used to run Diablo 4 and Cyberpunk 2077.

Indeed, Cyberpunk ran at 14 fps, which is not particularly playable. Diablo 4, however, ran wonderfully.

A way to port games to MacOS without actually porting them to MacOS could be a great development for the macOS gaming scene, or in some ways. Outside of mobile games and Apple Arcade, Apple has not put much effort into games. If anything, Apple has recently shifted its machines to specialized ARM hardware of its own design, making it even more difficult to play games on its systems, as few developers have bothered to port games to Apple's proprietary kit.

The key to Apple's new gaming horizon is the company's Game Porting Toolkit. The tool incorporates a compatibility layer similar to Valve's Proton and Wine, but whereas they convert Windows APIs to Linux-friendly ones, Apple's tool also converts code for x86-based machines to its own in-house Apple Silicon conversion is also necessary.

"Porting Windows games to the Mac has never been faster," Apple's Aiswariya Sreenivassan said in a WWDC video (via The Verge).

"This year, the new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment for running existing unmodified Windows games and can be used to quickly understand the graphics capabilities and performance potential of a game when running on a Mac.

This tool is a great tool to use when running games on a Mac.

The toolkit is intended to be used by developers to speed up the release of their games on macOS by eliminating some of the porting process. In this clip, Apple talks about developers porting a DirectX 12 build of "The Medium" and making sure it works. However, Apple has made the toolkit available for anyone to download, so naturally people are already porting it to their Macs and their favorite games.

Reddit user issa6 is already running Cyberpunk 2077 on his M1-powered MacBook using the toolkit and a Wine wrapper called Whisky. The frame rate is 14 fps or so, not much to brag about, but a more graphically powerful chip would probably give a bit more performance.

In fact, user just_reload_it found Diablo 4 performing well enough on M2 Max. They are seeing about 80 fps, which is not that surprising with the chunky GPU on this expensive Apple Silicon.

The r/macgaming subreddit is abuzz with people running Windows-based games on their Macs. User LayerKey even outlines a step-by-step guide to running games with the toolkit.

While Apple has struggled to get Mac games off the ground, this toolkit appears to empower Mac owners to play the games themselves. This is exactly what we want.