According to TechSpot , this year's WWDC event brought some exciting news for gamers and game developers. In addition to the expensive Vision Pro glasses or AR gaming toys, Apple also provided developers with a new Game Porting Toolkit to strengthen the power of games on macOS.

The new toolkit includes a compatibility layer that developers or even gamers can use to run DirectX 12 games on macOS. The toolkit's code is based on Proton, a compatibility layer developed by Valve to run Windows games on Linux. It also draws from the source code of CodeWeavers' CrossOver, which has developed its own compatibility layer to run DirectX 12 games on Mac.

The Game Porting Toolkit can translate native x86 code to Apple Silicon, intercepting and converting API calls for 3D graphics to the Mac's proprietary Metal API. It can also translate input, audio, networking, and everything else needed to run Windows games on Apple's new Arm chips.

However, running a game and experiencing it with good performance are two completely different things. Accordingly, Apple notes that the Game Porting Toolkit is a benchmarking tool for game developers, as a way to quickly test a Windows game on a Mac, to see if the game actually runs, what the expected performance is. From there, the developer can determine what optimizations need to be made to get the game to ship in the best way.

Redditors have been testing Apple’s new compatibility layer to run Cyberpunk 2077 on an M1 MacBook, Diablo IV on an M1 Max MacBook Pro, and Hogwarts Legacy on an M2 Max. The end experience was not smooth and buggy, but these early results from the Game Porting Toolkit are promising for a more robust macOS gaming landscape in the future.