Apple releases Proton-like tool to run DX12 Windows games on macOS

Apple has released a tool that allows DirectX 12 Windows games to be run on MacOS. The tool, which is similar to Valve’s Proton tool for Linux systems, can already be used by developers.

The Game Porting Toolkit should make it possible to run DirectX 12 Windows games directly on MacOS. This is specifically intended for developers so they can ’emulate’ an unmodified version of a Windows game on Mac systems to immediately see how well it is already running and what needs to be adjusted before the game can be made official ported.

In a demo Apple shows how DirectX 12 game The Medium can be played with this. This toolkit translates Windows API calls, for example for control, audio, file system and Direct3D, to the corresponding APIs in MacOS. For example, DirectX 12 games can be played on Macs without porting them, although Apple warns that this does not mean that all games will work properly. For best performance, a native port still needs to be worked on. However, according to Apple, this can save ‘months of work’ for developers, meaning that games can in theory be transferred to Macs more quickly.

Although this tool is in principle not intended for consumers to run all kinds of Windows games on MacOS, a user already has a wrapper for the toolkit released which should still make this possible for Macs with an M1 or M2 chip. On Reddit shows a user how he got Cyberpunk 2077 working on a Macbook Pro. The game runs on the Ultra setting at 15fps. Also among other things Diablo IV and Hogwarts Legacy are so playable, although this does not apply to all DX12 games and not all of them work equally smoothly.

Game Porting Toolkit