Apple intros Game Porting Toolkit to make macOS more attractive for game developers

As revealed at WWDC 2023, Apple is determined to make macOS more friendly for game developers. Besides the new Game Mode included with the upcoming macOS 14 Sonoma update, the list of supported games will soon expand with titles such as Layers of Fear, World of Warcraft, No Man’s Sky and Stray. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, as Apple also plans to offer a Game Porting Toolkit for game developers, which should allow for even more popular titles to see native support on the macOS platform.

The Game Porting Toolkit promises a more streamlined process with quicker evaluation times, simpler code conversion and shorter overall development time for existing game titles. The conversion side is handled via the Metal shader converter that now supports ray tracing along with Apple’s own spatial and temporal resolution upscaling solution called MetalFX.

This should be an extremely exciting prospect for game developers that are looking to add macOS as a supported platform, especially considering that most of the porting processes that used to take months can now happen in a matter of days. Also, since the integrated GPUs offered with the M processors are almost on par with the mid-range solutions from AMD and Nvidia, game developers should be able to optimize existing titles at least for smooth 1080p gaming on macOS.

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