The initiative of Manzana to improve gaming on Mac might involve some kind of emulation for bring Windows games to the Cupertino signature platform. Their Game Porting Toolkit includes a way for developers to test titles in this way, and therefore steps are being taken to do so.
At WWDC23 it has become clear that Apple will bet on improve everything that has to do with gaming on your computer operating system. However, the inclusion of a game mode in macOS Sonoma, and improved Bluetooth sample rates for controllers, might pale in comparison to what has been known to be detected in the Game Porting Toolkit.
By the way, for those of you who don’t know what the Game Porting Toolkit is, this is a set of tools that developers can use to port their Windows or console games to macOS, including a conversion process and performance evaluation.
Samples of the operation of this Apple emulator
Everything is so advanced that it is shown on YouTube an example of how it works (We leave it after this paragraph). As mentioned in the “State of the Platforms” presentation, Apple allows developers to run existing Windows games in an “emulation space.” Also, in the session “Bring Your Game to the Mac, Part 1: Make a Game Plan,” the company directly mentions how the emulation interface lists “instruction translation type and Direct3D,” among other key details.
The intention is to allow work and improve the “performance potential of the game immediately, eliminating months of initial work”, according to Apple itself. It is also intended to help developers determine if the game is worth porting to Windows and realize the amount of work required to accomplish that task.
By the way, in the source code it seems pretty clear that the tool is actually a Wine modification (the Linux emulator to access Windows content), based on CrossOver 21.1.1. An unusual item is that the game shown in a demo video appears to be running under Rosetta 2 and can handle games that use DirectX 12.
It is not clear that it reaches all users
Whether Apple has created a solution that can run DirectX 12 without issue remains to be seen, but if it has, there might be more use to it than just being a testing tool for developers. If Apple so wishes, and if the emulation or translation layer works well enoughthere would be the possibility of making it a publicly accessible feature in the macOS operating system.
Of course, that is unlikely to happenas Apple would benefit more from porting games to run on macOS rather than allowing Windows titles to run directly.
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