During last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced the Game Porting Toolkit to help developers port Windows games to macOS. It’s built on Wine, an open-source platform that bridges the gap between Windows software and Unix systems like, for example, macOS and Linux.
Since its announcement and a few updates later, we have seen several AAA games making a place for themselves on Mac, and the good news is that soon it will be a breeze to port these titles to iOS. That’s because Game Porting Toolkit 2 functions not just on Mac, but also on iPhone or iPad.
Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit now supports iOS 18 as well, alongside macOS. During a WWDC 2024 session last month, Apple explained how developers can use this toolkit to first bring a Windows game to macOS, and then easily adapt it for iPhone and iPad. This means developers can bring their games to both Mac and iOS devices.
Are we getting more AAA titles for iPhones and iPads? It looks like it.
The upcoming macOS Sequoia introduces Game Porting Toolkit 2 with several improvements and new features. Apart from bringing support for ray-tracing on compatible hardware and including the AVX2 instruction set, it also supports better graphics and is compatible with more software.
This is why, when developers optimize their games for macOS using this toolkit, they can smoothly adapt them for iOS. Because the toolkit shares support for things like game controllers, audio, and graphics between macOS and iOS. For example, game controller vibrations can be easily replicated on iPhones. Furthermore, developers can also debug and analyze their games during evaluation using Metal HUD, Metal GPU capture, and Metal System Trace.