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At its Worldwide Developers Conference 2023, Apple announced its much anticipated mixed-reality headset. But it is not the only thing that Apple has announced. The American tech giant also previewed the features and tools coming to its platforms later this year. One of such tools is the Game Porting Toolkit for Macs that is coming with the macOS Sonoma.
Currently available for developers, the toolkit enables Windows games on Macs. The Game Porting Toolkit will serve an emulation environment to run existing unmodified Windows game(s) on Apple Silicon Macs. Besides, it will dramatically simplify the process of translating game’s shaders and graphics code, said Aiswariya Sreenivassan, an engineering project manager for GPUs and graphics at Apple to The Verge. The Cupertino-based company also displayed a demo of the DirectX 12 game The Medium playing through the demo toolkit, which appeared to run glitch-free mostly.
The Game Porting Toolkit can only be downloaded by people with a developer account as it is currently aimed for the developer community.
The software can be employed by developers to make sense of the graphics feature usage and performance potential of their games and understand how they will run on a Mac before porting them for macOS, according to Apple.
For now, the tech company has not put any limitations on its installation and usage. It essentially means almost anyone with an Apple developer account can download the toolkit on their Macs and port the Windows games.
In spite of making all the right moves, the toolkit is not a panacea for all problems. So, when running Windows games on Mac, glitches and performance limitations can be expected. But, it provides an outlet to play some popular gaming titles on Mac. Apple has not made any announcement regarding plans to make it accessible to all Mac users in the future.
