Diablo IV, Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man already run on macOS thanks to the new Game Porting Toolkit emulator

Apple’s notoriously bad gaming support could become a thing of the past soon with the macOS Sonoma update that adds a Game Mode and the Game Porting Toolkit for developers. These features were presented without much fanfare at the WDCC ‘23 event, but some analysts believe that these somewhat underestimated gaming aspects coming to macOS may prove to be a big deal for Apple in the coming years. In the meantime, some macOS testers got a chance to play with the Game Porting Toolkit, and it was discovered that this also includes CrossOver’s Wine emulator that already allows DX12 game titles to run on macOS with decent results.

The Wine emulator is actually included for game developers to quickly assess and plan a game port, yet macOS users went ahead and further tweaked the software in order to allow games like Diablo IV, Cyberpunk 2077, Spider-Man, Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring to run even on first gen M1 processors. Of course, the performance on the M1 processors is not that great, but the newer M2 models with more powerful iGPUs show promising results.

Diablo IV, for instance, was tested on an M2 Max processor in 1512 x 982 resolution (half the actual max resolution of 3024 x 1964) with maximum quality settings and the Apple silicon was able to run the game at an average of 80 - 90 fps.

Another M2 Max owner tried Hogwarts Legacy with Medium settings and rendering resolution limited to 1008 x 655 and was able to hit 35-40 fps. Similar fps counts were recorded with the same processor in Spider-Man running at 1800 x 1169.

Running Cyberpunk 2077 on an older M1 chip proved a bit of a challenge. Cranking everything up to Ultra, the game only ran at ~15 fps with a scaled down resolution of 1440 x 900. A more powerful M2 could probably get close to 60 fps with High settings.

Elden Ring running on an M1 Pro in 1728 x 1117 resolution netted close to 50 fps, while an M2 Pro managed to hit 100+ fps in GTA 3 Vice City running at 1800 x 1033.

All these results were obtained without the aid of Apple’s MetalFX super resolution. A per title implementation for this feature should now be possible with the Game Porting Toolkit, further boosting the performance hopefully by a factor of at least two.

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