Still, attempts to leverage success in the mobile and casual game market and buoy the Mac, using technologies such as Metal, just haven’t worked. Ironically, Apple has found immense gaming success - but on mobile. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images Not even Intel chips could make gaming A Thing on Mac. Steam, the most popular digital distribution marketplace for desktop games, didn’t even get Mac support until 2010. The lack of native gaming engines and developer tools left most would-be Mac gamers to use Boot Camp, the system tool that made it easy to install Windows on an Intel Mac. In 2006, Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, giving the steadfastly loyal and fervent (if small) Mac gaming community hope that the x86 architecture would make it easier for game studios and publishers to bring their games to the platform. This isn’t (strictly) because of disinterest Apple’s history is littered with attempts to make desktop Mac gaming a “thing” (the Pippin, stands out as a particularly brutal failure). The Long, Sad Journey of Gaming on the Macįor over three decades, Apple has fought against the truism that although Macs might be best-in-class for video editing, graphics, and design work, if you want to play AAA games, you need to use a PC (usually running Windows). But even without that, this new technology, wrapped in a developer toolkit, is the best thing to happen to the Mac gaming market in at least 30 years. And sure, some studios and developers may choose to do just that, depending on the work involved and the potential for the user base. The unsaid (but very clear insinuation) would be for those developers or studios to then submit the newly “converted” titles to the Mac App Store, where Apple enjoys a 30 percent revenue cut. Rosetta 2, the compatibility layer built into macOS to seamlessly convert x86 macOS APIs (Intel) into ARM64 macOS APIs (Apple silicon), works with Wine/CrossOver, but the performance impact of translating one system call to another on top of a compatibility layer that is designed to translate one architecture type to another is not insignificant.Īpple’s hope is that developers will use the Game Porting Toolkit as a jumping-off point to optimize the game code and shaders to make the experience really work for Mac gamers. It isn’t emulation, but translation (an important semantic difference).Īlthough Wine (and CrossOver) have existed as a way to bring PC games to the Mac for quite some time, the Apple silicon transition has been difficult on the project. Wine, which is primarily supported by the company CodeWeavers (which also makes a commercial version called CrossOver), works by converting system calls made to Windows APIs into calls that can be used by other operating systems. That toolkit largely takes place as a 20,000 line of code patch to Wine, a compatibility layer designed to bring support for Windows games to platforms such as Linux, BSD, and macOS. It turns out that Apple added DirectX 12 support via something it is calling the Game Porting Toolkit, a tool Apple is offering to developers to see how their existing x86 DirectX 12 games work on Macs powered by Apple silicon. Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end to the old joke that Macs can't play AAA games. As PC gamers already know, this software support means the floodgates are open for some real games - not that casual Apple Arcade stuff - on Mac. Cool, 2005 and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger would like to remind you that we’ve seen this film before.īut buried in the keynote was a macOS feature that Apple should have called out with more fanfare: DirectX 12 support for macOS. Apple announced three new Macs - the 15-inch MacBook Air, M2 Max/Ultra Mac Studio, and M2 Ultra Mac Pro - but mostly breezed past macOS Sonoma and its “new” desktop widgets. At WWDC last week, most of the focus was rightfully on the new Apple Vision Pro headset and the new visionOS.
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