Apple's Windows Game Porting Toolkit gets faster with new update

AppleInsider

Apple has updated the Game Porting Toolkit, with version 1.0.2 of the development tool now working at a higher level of performance when running Windows games on a Mac.

The introduction of the Game Porting Toolkit during WWDC 2023 offered a way to show developers what a game made for Windows could look like when running on a Mac. The kit included elements such as an emulation interface, to give developers an idea of how their game will run under macOS.

Updated on June 30 and first reported by Andrew Tsai via YouTube on Tuesday, Game Porting Toolkit Beta 1.0.2 is a refresh of the original release. However, while Apple doesn't offer any documentation about what's different in the release, there are a number of good changes to the kit.

For the first update, Apple's included instructions mistakenly refer to it as version 1.0, not 1.0.2, and they do not mention any upgrading instructions, only installation.

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One of the signs that the toolkit has been updated is in the Rosetta line in the statistics panel that appears while playing a game has the label "v0.2," which wasn't shown for the first. The new version is also nearly half the size of the original, at 27.9MB versus 53.4MB.

Posts by Nat Brown, an Apple engineering manager responsible for the toolkit, mentions there are fixes for 32-bit support, rendering, and performance, as well as overall stability. Brown also mentions that there was an intention to add change logs, but the team "just ran out of runway before the holiday weekend."

Performance improvements have been spotted, but they vary between games and chips. In examples by Tsai, "Elden Ring" running on an M1 Max saw a 20% improvement between versions, while "Arkham Knight" is shown to be running at about the same level of performance as before the update.

On the high-end M2 Ultra," Cyberpunk 2077" was able to run at approximately double the frame rate under the new toolkit.

For stability, some games would crash under the original if they played video cutscenes using specific codecs. After the update, they work fine in most cases.

Apple's use of the Game Porting Toolkit is still only a developer-specific tool, rather than one meant for consumer gaming. The improvements certainly do make it easier for the public to play Windows games on a Mac, but that's only a byproduct of Apple refining what it still considers a development assistant.

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saarek

This really is brilliant work on the part of Apple. Yes, they’re progressing on the base that was already out there, but this really is game changing. Excuse the pun.

macxpress

I hope gaming studios take full advantage of this. Apple has some pretty decent graphics built into every single Mac, even something like the MacBook Air. I hope Apple continues to support this and doesn't just say they're back supporting gaming on the Mac and then a year later stop paying attention to it like they've done so many times before. This looks to have some great things going for it though. 

chutzpah

Doubling the frame rate is very impressive, even if it is just a single title.  I wonder if there is any internal discussion about whether Apple should promote this consumer side and work on a user friendly interface so this could be their version of Proton.

I get that Apple want to push native games and use of Metal, but they've been banging that drum for a while now with little movement.  Maybe the success than Valve has been seeing is getting them to re-evaluate.

jblongz

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

auxio

jblongz said:

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

Computer graphics is definitely one of the more complex areas of programming. I remember first trying to learn it (and now I'll be dating myself) from Michael Abrash's articles on the Quake engine back in the late 1990s, and having a tough time wrapping my head around it. I eventually learned it from the CG bible, where it's presented more formally and without the complexity of clever optimizations.

Anyways, once you wrap your head around the concepts and how GPUs work, Metal is no different from other modern GPU rendering architectures like Vulkan. I actually find MSL to be much easier to use than GLSL and other shader languages. And Apple's rendering pipeline is much easier to debug problems with than DirectX (at least, when I used it about 10 years ago). But yes, if you're only used to a prepackaged 3D engine like Unreal or Unity, the internals of how they work (using DirectX/Vulkan/Metal) can certainly be daunting.

danox

jblongz said:

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

A list of game engines, you don’t need to use Unreal Engine or Unity, they just happen to be two of the best (most used).

(There are also many other support programs that run with or alongside of the various game engines)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

It must be said Apple got a late start into this end of the computer market, game engines have evolved into areas of the market far beyond just playing games, Unreal Engine is just that Unreal, some of the things that it is able to do is on the cutting edge of modern computer graphics, Sweeney Todd is definitely a mad genius……..

edited July 2023

chutzpah

jblongz said:

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

People who make high end game engines are pretty smart.

melgross

One of the main reasons for the failure of high end gaming on the Mac has been lack of customer interest. I know that those who want this on the Mac, REALLY want this. But it’s not as widespread as those people think it is.  You group that with the much smaller Mac market overall, and that’s a problem. Adding to that it the fact that a fair percentage of Macs are owned by creative companies where their computers simply aren’t allowed to be used for that. My own company was an example of that though we sold it long ago. 

So it can be difficult to convince gamer developers to spend a lot of money developing for the Mac. It isn’t as though many haven’t tried over they years. They have, but sales were disappointing. I remember way back in the 1990s when I was in the board of NYMUG (New York Mac Users Group.). We had 5,400 members at the time. One meeting, and we would get an average over over 350 people to a monthly meeting, we had Symantec give a talk about their new product. Afterwards, I asked them why PC users got a 250 page manual, in paper, and we just got a few pages of a quick start guide and had to go online (which was new at the time, and very slow). The answer was that sales to PC users was almost ten times higher, and they had to cut back to Mac users somewhere or they couldn’t afford to make the product. Product development on the Mac and Windows costs about the same, so the loss of the manual was saving them money, and permitting them to have the product for us.

it’s the same with game development. So a lot of games that do make it over are ported from Windows, usually unsatisfactorily. So they don’t sell. 

Hopefully, finally, this will help. But it’s still a matter of getting enough Mac users to buy them. Most Mac users I’ve known over the years are not real game players. At least, not these heavy games. So it will still be work convincing a market that may not inherently be suited to this game market. Good luck.

auxio

danox said:

jblongz said:

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

A list of game engines, you don’t need to use Unreal Engine or Unity, they just happen to be two of the best (most used).

(There are also many other support programs that run with or alongside of the various game engines)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

It must be said Apple got a late start into this end of the computer market, game engines have evolved into areas of the market far beyond just playing games, Unreal Engine is just that Unreal, some of the things that it is able to do is on the cutting edge of modern computer graphics, Sweeney Todd is definitely a mad genius……..

Most of the recent advances in CG are essentially ways to hardware accelerate concepts which have been around since the 1960s/70s (e.g. hardware ray tracing). As Alan Kay put it, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware". Just need economies of scale to bring the manufacturing costs down. GPUs being able to perform double-duty for machine learning has certainly aided in that.

auxio

melgross said:

Hopefully, finally, this will help. But it’s still a matter of getting enough Mac users to buy them. Most Mac users I’ve known over the years are not real game players. At least, not these heavy games. So it will still be work convincing a market that may not inherently be suited to this game market. Good luck.

The way I see it, there are two main categories of gamers: casual and enthusiasts.

Casual gamers, if they really care beyond just killing time with free games, tend to buy a console or handheld gaming system because you just turn it on and go. That's where Nintendo is king: simplicity. Apple doesn't have a dedicated gaming device (the closest would be the Apple TV, but that still requires extra cost/work to setup for games) so they don't really compete in this market.

Enthusiasts want a gaming system they can tweak and upgrade to get the best performance and play the latest, cutting edge games (e.g. pop in a new GPU to get hardware ray tracing). Apple moving in the direction of computers which aren't customizable at all means they don't compete in this market either.

The only gamers Apple is getting are the ones who are happy with free games on the App Store. Which is actually quite a big market, but Apple only incidentally benefits from it because people bought an iPhone for other reasons and just happen to game on it. That and some people who already own an Apple TV and decide to try gaming on it (again, incidental). None of Apple's hardware actually targets the gaming market specifically, and as you stated, that's been the case ever since the beginning of Apple.

melgross

auxio said:

melgross said:

Hopefully, finally, this will help. But it’s still a matter of getting enough Mac users to buy them. Most Mac users I’ve known over the years are not real game players. At least, not these heavy games. So it will still be work convincing a market that may not inherently be suited to this game market. Good luck.

The way I see it, there are two main categories of gamers: casual and enthusiasts.

Casual gamers, if they really care beyond just killing time with free games, tend to buy a console or handheld gaming system because you just turn it on and go. That's where Nintendo is king: simplicity. Apple doesn't have a dedicated gaming device (the closest would be the Apple TV, but that still requires extra cost/work to setup for games) so they don't really compete in this market.

Enthusiasts want a gaming system they can tweak and upgrade to get the best performance and play the latest, cutting edge games (e.g. pop in a new GPU to get hardware ray tracing). Apple moving in the direction of computers which aren't customizable at all means they don't compete in this market either.

The only gamers Apple is getting are the ones who are happy with free games on the App Store. Which is actually quite a big market, but Apple only incidentally benefits from it because people bought an iPhone for other reasons and just happen to game on it. That and some people who already own an Apple TV and decide to try gaming on it (again, incidental). None of Apple's hardware actually targets the gaming market specifically, and as you stated, that's been the case ever since the beginning of Apple.

That’s pretty much true. I remember for a few years after that Mac came out that PC users would call Macs toys. It was always ironic as they had the games and Mac users didn’t.

mjtomlin

chutzpah said:

Doubling the frame rate is very impressive, even if it is just a single title.  I wonder if there is any internal discussion about whether Apple should promote this consumer side and work on a user friendly interface so this could be their version of Proton.

I get that Apple want to push native games and use of Metal, but they've been banging that drum for a while now with little movement.  Maybe the success than Valve has been seeing is getting them to re-evaluate.

I seriously doubt Apple will ever promote or release this tool kit as an “emulator”. However, I thought I read somewhere that DX12 support is coming to Crossover later this year, so it makes me wonder if Apple is going to push their code back into the WINE project.

michelb76

The only way this will ever work is if the majority of mac users will buy the ports that are coming out now. So go buy Resident Evil and Death Stranding, whether you like them or not. It's a chicken and egg situation. We soon may have a great toolkit for developers, but it's worthless without a market. It's either that, or keep using Crossover and hope for the best.

macpro

IMHO, there are two types of gamers.

Those that wants to run such things as (off the top of my head)  Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto V and VI, and the likes of Zero Dawn Horizon, Assassin's Creed, and so on at a minimum of  27" in 4K @ 60 fps.  That's me, last year I purchased a ready-built, water-cooled Corsair Vengeance with an i9 and RTX 3080 Ti, DDR5, and all NVME SSDs to do this.  It cost more than a Mac Studio Ultra,  runs hot enough to fry eggs, and is very noisy, plus it is massive and heavy.  It does have pretty RGB lighting though

Then there are the PC enthusiasts who build their own PCs, and the games are really just benchmarking products for them.  They want to fine-tune the machines they make to extract the highest frame and refresh rates to win bragging rights on blogs.  They are the equivalent of the car enthusiast who wants the ability to strip the fuel injection system down and polish his exhaust ports and go drag racing (or dream they do).  

The first group would buy a Mac Studio in a heartbeat if it ran all those top-level games. Apple should definitely work with top-level game developers; it is a market worth pursuing.

The second group would never buy a ready-built computer to start with, let alone one they can't tinker with.  This group must have nightmares about SOCs invading the PC industry.

edited July 2023

marvin

jblongz said:

How are people making high-end games for iOS/MacOS without tools like Unreal Engine or Unity?  I've read some introductory documents about Metal and it seems so complex just for that one area of gave development.   Anyone know that the Apple pipeline really looks like?

Metal concerns the rendering pipeline, which is a very small part of a game engine but a critical part for performance.

The bulk of a game engine handles where everything is and how it moves - geometry, textures, lights, physics, AI - and this is cross-platform.

Metal just draws the result by taking the geometry, textures and materials and producing the rendered image.

The code to do this is around 10k lines of code out of millions. It's not a lot of code but is very Math heavy and complex. It's like kernel code of an OS. The people who work on game rendering engines are very skilled developers.

It only needs to be implemented once per engine. It has been used for different emulators. Here's one that emulates Nintendo Switch games on Mac:



The Switch is less than 1/10th the performance of M1 Max so once the code is emulated on the CPU, the drawing part can be run through Metal and it runs very fast. The M-series Macs run very cool so it's a good emulation experience.

mjtomlin said:

chutzpah said:

Doubling the frame rate is very impressive, even if it is just a single title.  I wonder if there is any internal discussion about whether Apple should promote this consumer side and work on a user friendly interface so this could be their version of Proton.

I get that Apple want to push native games and use of Metal, but they've been banging that drum for a while now with little movement.  Maybe the success than Valve has been seeing is getting them to re-evaluate.

I seriously doubt Apple will ever promote or release this tool kit as an “emulator”. However, I thought I read somewhere that DX12 support is coming to Crossover later this year, so it makes me wonder if Apple is going to push their code back into the WINE project.

I hope they do allow it to be used as an emulator, even if it's just embedded by the developer. Nintendo has done this with old games.

I doubt they will contribute back to WINE, it's Mac-specific code they have added for Metal. There's already a tool to patch Crossover with it. All that would be needed is for them to publish a compiled library with Xcode and allow apps like Crossover to embed it commercially. If Crossover/Codeweavers partnered with Steam, they could have a set of compatible games and install them like a native game.

There are still a few compatibility issues because a lot of games use Windows launchers and those need to use a system UI but quite a few big titles work:

https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Game_Porting_Toolkit#Game_compatibility_list 

auxio said:

melgross said:

Hopefully, finally, this will help. But it’s still a matter of getting enough Mac users to buy them. Most Mac users I’ve known over the years are not real game players. At least, not these heavy games. So it will still be work convincing a market that may not inherently be suited to this game market. Good luck.

The way I see it, there are two main categories of gamers: casual and enthusiasts.

Casual gamers, if they really care beyond just killing time with free games, tend to buy a console or handheld gaming system because you just turn it on and go. That's where Nintendo is king: simplicity. Apple doesn't have a dedicated gaming device (the closest would be the Apple TV, but that still requires extra cost/work to setup for games) so they don't really compete in this market.

Enthusiasts want a gaming system they can tweak and upgrade to get the best performance and play the latest, cutting edge games (e.g. pop in a new GPU to get hardware ray tracing). Apple moving in the direction of computers which aren't customizable at all means they don't compete in this market either.

The only gamers Apple is getting are the ones who are happy with free games on the App Store. Which is actually quite a big market, but Apple only incidentally benefits from it because people bought an iPhone for other reasons and just happen to game on it. That and some people who already own an Apple TV and decide to try gaming on it (again, incidental). None of Apple's hardware actually targets the gaming market specifically, and as you stated, that's been the case ever since the beginning of Apple.

The enthusiast gaming market is small (like 2-3% of 100-200 million), most people are using cheap GPUs like Nvidia 3060 < $500:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

The important thing is the number of games available on the platform, especially the most popular ones. If they focused on getting the top 100 games running by whatever means, that would make a big difference to how many gamers invested in the platform for gaming:

https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed

The M-series GPUs and Macbook Airs help a lot because this puts 3TFLOPs+ GPU in the hands of over 70 million Mac users.