As Apple introduced its new Game Porting Tool during the 2023 WWDC aimed at developers, the company released its first beta update and it comes with several significant enhancements.
Releasing Update for Game Porting Toolkit
Apple released the Game Porting Tool update version 1.0.2 that now works at a higher level of performance when running Windows games on a Mac.
According to a report from 9To5Mac, the new update is a refresh of the original release but it was observed that games are running at much higher frame rates.
For instance, the frame rate when running the game Elden Ring has increased from 26 frames to 32 frames per second on a Mac powered by the M1 Max chip. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk on an M2 Ultra Mac has an average frame per second going from 8 FPS to 18 FPS.
One of the newly-added updates can be seen in the Rosetta line in the statistics panel that appears while playing a game that has the label "v0.2," which was not shown for the first version of the tool kit. Aside from this, the new version is also nearly half the size of the original at 27.9MB versus 53.4 MB.
As per Apple Engineering Manager Nat Brown who is responsible for the toolkit, there are fixes for 32-bit support, rendering, performance, as well as overall stability. The engineering manager mentioned that Apple also intended to add change logs. However, the team just ran out of runway before the holiday weekend.
M1, M2 Ultra Chips Compatibility
As observed through Andew Tsai's YouTube video, these increases seem that the Game Porting Tool has some compatibility issues with Apple's M1 and M2 Ultra chips, knowing that the same games perform better on less powerful chipsets.
The reason behind this could be related to the fact that the Ultra chips combine two Max chips into one with UltraFusion technology. This means it might now have ye the full support for it. Some games also experienced crashes under the original if they played video cutscenes when using specific codecs. This was resolved in the recent update.
Apple Insider reported that the Game Porting Toolkit is currently a developer-specific tool rather than for consumer gaming. These improvements aim to make it easier for the public to play games from Windows on a Mac computer or Macbook. However, this is only a byproduct of Apple and still considers a development assistant.
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The new Game Porting Toolkit translates Intel-based x86 instructions and Windows APIs to Apple Silicon instead. As per The Verge's report, APIs that are related to keyboard, mouse, controller, input, audio playback, networking, file system, and Direct3D will be translated to the corresponding APIs in macOS.
"These new tools enable developers to quickly evaluate just how well their game can run on Mac. A process that used to take months can now be done in days, and they dramatically simplify the process of converting the game's shaders and graphics code to take full advantage of the Apple silicon," GPU Software Senior Director Jeremy Sandmel
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