Apple’s new Proton-like tool can run Windows games on a Mac

theverge.com:

By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.

If you’re hoping to see more Windows games on Mac then those dreams might finally come true soon. Apple has dropped some big news for game developers at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week, making it far easier and quicker to port Windows games to Mac thanks to a Proton-like environment that can translate and run the latest DirectX 12 Windows games on macOS.

Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.

Mac gaming has been a long running meme among the PC gaming community, despite Resident Evil Village and No Man’s Sky ports being some rare recent exceptions to macOS gaming being largely ignored.

“The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac,” explains Aiswariya Sreenivassan, an engineering project manager for GPUs and graphics at Apple, in a WWDC session earlier this week.

This Game Porting Toolkit even supports DirectX 12 games like The Medium, with Sreenivassan demonstrating running the game through Apple’s translation layer. Much like how Wine and Proton combine to create a software layer to translate Windows API calls to Linux, Apple is doing something similar