The first update of Apple’s Game Porting Tool improves the performance of games

Apple introduced a new service called Game Porting Tool in macOS Sonoma, which allows developers to easily publish Windows games to Mac. This tool, which is currently in beta, has received its first update.

According to 9to5MacApple’s new tool is based on the popular open source Wine platform, which can translate Windows software for Unix environments (such as macOS and Linux).

Apple’s tool has some big improvements over the regular version of Wine, such as the ability to translate DirectX 12 to Metal 3 in real-time. This feature makes games run natively on Mac and their performance improves significantly.

The Game Porting Tool is primarily released with developers in mind, but anyone who knows how to work with the Terminal can port Windows games to the Mac.

The beta version 1.0.2 of Apple’s Game Porting toolkit improves the performance of games. People who have worked with the new version say that in most scenarios ported games run at higher frame rates than the original version.

For example, the frame rate of the popular Elder Ring game in the new version of Apple’s tool increased from 26 frames per second to 32 frames per second. This performance was recorded on a Mac equipped with an M1 Max processor. When running Cyberpunk 2077 on the M2 Ultra processor, the average frame rate increased from eight fps to 18 fps.

Apparently, Apple’s new tool is not fully compatible with the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra processors; Because Cyberpunk 2077 runs better on processors that are less powerful than the two. The frame rate of the Cyberpunk 2077 game on the M1 Max chip reached 40 frames per second.

In Apple’s Ultra series chips, we see the combination of two Max chips with UltraFusion technology; Maybe Game Porting Tool can’t support UltraFusion technology yet.

Some games, such as Horizon Zero Dawn and Resident Evil 2, which were not compatible with the original version of Apple’s tool, now run well. The new version of Game Porting Tool includes support for 32-bit software; But the performance of these softwares is not satisfactory at the moment.