As we told you yesterday, during WWDC 2023 came a potentially huge novelty for Mac gaming: a sort of “compatibility layer” that allows Windows games to run on macOS with virtually no effort on the part of the developer. To understand, it can be considered the equivalent of Proton of Steam, thanks to which Steam Deck, which has a Linux-based operating system, runs games compiled for Microsoft’s platform.
The tool is called, quite simply, Game Porting Kit, and is open-source: you can download it freely on the Apple website, but you must be registered as a developer. Apple created it for a reason: to allow developers to make an initial assessment of the potential of a Windows game on Mac and the amount of work needed for a possible port, and is part of a broader initiative that aims to expand the gaming capabilities of its computers. We saw, during the opening keynote of the conference, the intervention of none other than Hideo Kojima who announced the future arrival of Death Stranding on Mac.
Being an open-source tool, the community threw itself into it. An independent developer has created the application called Whisky, in turn open-source (follow the SOURCE link at the bottom of the article to download it from GitHub) that once installed on the Mac allows you to run any Windows game simply by copying the files into a folder that the app is able to recognize. Videos of very heavy or very recent games or both, such as Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo IV (released literally the day before yesterday!) and Hogwarts Legacy are circulating that work without too big problems on MacBook Pro equipped with various Apple Silicon chips. Warning: you need macOS Sonoma, whose Developer Beta has just started circulating.
Of course, it is important not to create unrealistic expectations: there are significant performance problems and it cannot be excluded that even serious bugs emerge. We are in a pioneering phase and the precise limits of the tool are still to be clarified – more than anything, it is still to be understood if and how much they can be moved and improved. But it’s pretty clear that Apple seems interested in changing pace when it comes to “serious” gaming on its Macs, now that the transition to the Apple Silicon world has been completed with the advent of the new Mac Pro with M2 Ultra chip. As for the community of video game and Mac enthusiasts, the excitement is definitely palpable: there are several voices that already call the tool the biggest news ever, and communities and platforms are popping up at extreme speed around Whiskey and Apple’s compatibility layer.