Apple’s new game porting tool can run Diablo 4 & more on M1/M2 Macs

At WWDC 2023, Apple announced a brand-new tool that could make games like Diablo 4 playable on its Apple silicon devices, and you can try it out for yourself right now.

WWDC 2023 not only heralded the arrival of the Apple Vision Pro headset but also came with a huge number of updates to their various operating systems. One such thing that got slightly buried was that the Cupertino company has released a brand-new porting tool, which could make games, which were previously not available on Apple’s ARM-based devices fully playable.

Not only was Death Stranding coming as a native port, but the new Game Porting Toolkit is available for developers to use to see how easy it is to emulate DirectX12. But, some users have been using the toolkit to make their own ports for titles like Diablo IV and Cyberpunk 2077.

The toolkit is based on Crossover’s source code, which is based on Wine, which Valve also uses for Proton. The easiest way to explain how it works is to liken it to how Valve gets games running on the Steam Deck using Proton. The tool essentially runs as a translation layer for the tool, where a set of instructions is read and optimized by the system.

The availability of the toolkit to developers has led to some making their own ports of games, as one Twitter user highlights.

Everyone is talking about the Vision Pro but Apple just quietly dropped their game porting toolkit that converts Windows game to Mac

It released yesterday and here's video of someone running Diablo IV on max settings on an M2 Mac Book Pro pic.twitter.com/t2nyTAhsJG

— Daniel Luu 🔜 GDC (@squishguin) June 7, 2023

Don’t expect native-level performance yet

Blizzard Entertainment

While these advancements in Mac gaming are exciting, some titles are still unsupported, and others may pose issues for the conversion tool. As one Reddit user highlights on the Mac Gaming subreddit, titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V are still not running correctly. This may improve over time with updates, however.

It will be incredibly interesting to see how well Apple’s own silicon holds up against other gaming laptops, as this tool could open the floodgates to millions of users now getting their gaming library up to speed with the Game Porting Toolkit. Equally, if the toolkit is just as easy as running a couple of lines of code, we could see many more gamers simply opt to pick up a Mac, instead of a gaming PC or laptop. It’s early days, but it feels great to finally have some competition in the space.

There is also some legwork involved to get the tool running for you, but Frityet has already posted a handy guide to get games running on MacOS over on Github.