It was little more than a side note when Apple dropped its new game porting toolkit at its WWDC event last week. But it could point to a revolution for PC gaming.
Similar to Valve’s Proton technology for running Windows games on Linux, Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit allows you to run unmodified Windows games on macOS and thus Mac and MacBook. Inevitably and almost immediately cue the bizarre spectacle of CyberPunk running on MacBook.
Game code emulation technology on hardware platforms becomes baffling very quickly. But the broad brush with Apple’s technology is that it’s actually based on the CrossOver source code, an existing Wine-based solution for running Windows DX12 games on macOS.
Basically, there are two things to like about the Game Porting Toolkit. First, it’s not meant to be a solution for gamers to run Windows games on their Mac. It is designed for developers to help them evaluate their game’s out-of-the-box performance as the first step in optimizing it for macOS. So it doesn’t suddenly turn every Mac into a gaming rig.
And second? Despite this, many games perform remarkably well. When you see something as demanding as Cyberpunk get decent frame rates on an Apple laptop, well, it’s hard not to notice.
As it happens, Cyberpunk isn’t really an example of a game that works very well via the toolkit. Mac Gamer HQ lists it as simply “average” in terms of performance and therefore under many titles, including Diablo 4, GTA 5, and Overwatch 2.
Either way, the thing is, Apple’s Toolkit is just the latest example of how gaming seems to be heading more and more in a hardware-independent direction. Proton already makes it easier than ever to run Windows games on Linux. But it’s just a change in operating system, rather than hardware.
When you think about the complexity and fidelity of the graphics in something like Cyberpunk, and the fact that you’re not just dealing with a change in operating system, but the GPU in Apple’s M1 and M2 chips was never designed to be DX12 compliant – oh, and you’re translating from x86 to ARM, to boot – it’s pretty amazing to get decent performance with on-the-fly emulated code.
Now, we’re not suggesting for a moment that Apple Macs are suddenly going to be a great choice for gamers. In the short to medium term, the ability to play PC games on a MacBook will remain a fringe benefit at best rather than a fully functional feature you can rely on.
Likewise, Apple products are hardly the budget option. But if they end up being a real alternative to the painfully expensive GPUs from Nvidia and AMD in at least some parts of the market, it will increase competition. And that must be a good thing.
The same goes for the wider x86 compared to ARM. Currently, PC gamers can only choose between AMD and Intel processors using the x86 instruction set. But if we get to the point where the underlying architecture doesn’t matter and ARM chips are viable for gaming, well, that really could be a lot of choice.
Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Not only will you need an ARM processor, but also something to plug it into. And that something will need a high-bandwidth interface for a discrete GPU. Or the ARM chip itself will need its own integrated GPU capable of gaming-grade performance, which is quite a request.
But if emulation rigs make it realistic to run PC games on ARM chips, who’s to say a company like Qualcomm might not come up with a chip with decent mid-range gaming performance that would upset the market ?
None of this will happen overnight. And yet, emulation technology has improved dramatically in recent years. The idea of hardware-independent games, modern games that can run on all kinds of hardware, seems much more viable than ever.
Given that it seems a bit like Nvidia in particular is holding the entire PC gaming industry hostage with its GPU pricing lately, anything promising alternatives is very welcome.