Is Mac on the verge of a gaming revolution?

Mac gaming has always been a bit of a punchline, despite Apple’s best efforts. The fundamental problem is that it takes substantial development resources to bring games over to the platform, which occupies a small fraction of the computing market. Every year a few high-profile games are trickled out, while most other titles skip macOS entirely – but that might be changing.

Apple recently released a tool called the Game Porting Toolkit (GPT), which simulates a Windows environment and translates DirectX API calls to Apple’s own Metal API, all the while translating x86 instructions to Apple Silicon’s ARM instruction set. It’s effectively a translation layer, like Valve’s Proton on Steam Deck, with the same capability to run high-end games at playable frame-rates. But how good is GPT – and are we really on the verge of a Mac gaming revolution?

Actually getting the Game Porting Toolkit set up on a modern Mac computer is a fairly simple process – just upgrade to macOS 14 Sonoma and download Whisky, which is a graphical interface by developer Isaac Marovitz for the Game Porting Toolkit. From there, download the disk image file for the Game Porting Toolkit, boot Whisky and drop it in.

Read more

news

related articles

Porttitor sed maecenas consectetur. Nunc, sem imperdiet ultrices sed eleifend adipiscing facilisis arcu pharetra. Cras nibh egestas neque

comment