Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote shone a light on gaming updates coming to the company's many platforms. And though they have been majorly overshadowed by Apple Intelligence, the announcement of Game Porting Toolkit 2 (GPTK2) alongside macOS Sequoia is a surprisingly big deal, thanks to a few key updates.
Game Porting Toolkit allows developers to more easily bring their games from other platforms to Apple's devices, and the new Game Porting Toolkit 2 expands the tool's capabilities. As well as unifying Xcode support for easier use by developers, GPTK2 works better to port games to multiple devices at once, and even comes with support for ray tracing and AVX/AVX2. AVX, for the uninitiated, is instructions for a CPU to perform certain demanding tasks outside of the traditional scope of a CPU. This originally came from Intel CPUs in the '00s that needed that extra power to work with some games.
It’s basically a standard now for CPUs so Mac machines, specifically those with Apple’s own M line of chips, commonly ran into a problem where they didn’t support AVX and couldn’t run games that use it. Now, with GPTK2, this problem is a thing of the past and many new games are suddenly available to play, as long as you download GPTK2 first. You can even find a handy step-by-step instructions guide on the Apple developer site. Once you’ve got this out of the way, let’s get onto some of those new games.
Big PlayStation 5 titles now playable on Mac
Starting out of the gate swinging, Horizon Forbidden West, Ratchet & Clank: RIft Apart, Returnal, and Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection are all playable on Mac now. All four of these are recent Sony PlayStation ports, playable on PC, which all required AVX support. You can now run them on-device with no problems, though Horizon and Ratchet & Clank will likely need an M2 chip or later with 16GB of RAM, or your experience may be a bit choppy. This isn’t GPTK’s fault — they're just a pair of intensive (and astoundingly pretty) games. Ratchet & Clank can be particularly intensive, especially if you put on ray tracing mode.
Fancy a bonus game? Hi-Fi Rush, the last game from the now-closed studio Tango Gameworks finally works on Mac too. It started life on Xbox and Windows, and is now available on PS5, too. As pointed out in this video, the M3 MacBook Pro from last year can run the game at Max settings at 1440p, consistently getting more than 60fps.
As noted on the Macgaming subreddit, Dragon’s Dogma 2 now gets past the first loading screen, which is better than it has ever performed previously, though I haven’t been able to test this one out myself.
Just the start
The first macOS Sequoia beta has just arrived, and some users are reporting that AVX support is inconsistent as GPTK2 initially reaches developers. But people have only had the program for days at this point. As developers working on apps like Crossover and Parallels get more time with it, better, cleaner support will only come alongside it.
Getting AVX compatibility is huge for current and future Sony ports and other AVX games, but don’t overlook advancements made to Xcode either. Sharing and updating code will be made much easier, and open-source software will only advance as a result. In addition, the effort to unify Mac, iPhone, and iPad gaming software through GPTK means that running games on all Apple devices will be much easier.
In the step-by-step instruction guide on the Apple Developer website, Ubisoft says that GPTK saved months of dev time from the Assassin’s Creed Mirage port, and it could have even helped the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows on launch day later this year. GPTK2 is already a great program for gaming enthusiasts but it could further pave the way for official port support further down the line, and the results for Ubisoft already show that.
Have we missed your favorite GPTK-supported game? If so, let us know in the comments below.
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