Apple silicon created unified gaming platform across iPhone, iPad, and Mac

With MacOS Sonoma, Apple had launched a Game Porting Toolkit that lets developers bring games from other platforms such as Windows to Mac

Apple is actively working on improving the gaming experience on Mac, said Apple officials to Inverse in an interview. With advancements in chip architecture, Apple has started putting major emphasis on gaming on both Mac and iPhones.

“Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3,” said Gordon Keppel, Mac product marketing manager at Apple, to Inverse. He added that the current Mac line up, powered by the Apple silicon, can run AAA title video games smoothly.

Leland Martin, a software marketing manager at Apple, said that Apple silicon has simplified the development process for video game companies as well. He said that until a few years ago the Mac lineup featured a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs that created problems for developers, “we’ve effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac”, he added. “Once a game is designed for one platform, it’s a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We’re seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first on Mac followed by iPhone and iPad”, said Martin.

With MacOS Sonoma, Apple launched its Game Porting Toolkit that lets developers bring games from other platforms such as Windows to Mac. Speaking on how the Game Porting Toolkit works, Martin said, “you drop in an existing Windows game and see how well it could run on the Mac. The second part is the Metal shader converter and that’s there to help developers convert their tens of thousands of shader code into Metal”. He added that game publishers like Kojima Productions, developers of the Death Stranding series have shown interest in taking advantage of the toolkit.