You Can Play Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy on Your MacBook Right Now
People buy Macs for video editing. People buy Macs for programming. Nobody buys a Mac for gaming. Of course, you can play on a Mac: Mac games are available on both Steam and the App Store, and on an Intel Mac, you can emulate Windows to run PC games (albeit with many compromises).
But Apple Silicon has problems with the last point, which limits its gaming capabilities. Luckily for all of us macOS gamers, Apple wants that to change.
Apple Game Porting Toolkit changes the rules of the game
During its WWDC event last week, Apple announced a new “Game Porting Toolkit” for macOS designed for game developers to port their existing PC games to Apple Silicon. However, as it turns out, this toolkit is also an ideal starting point for consumers to play PC games on their M1 or M2 machines.
Dave Lee of Dave2D dived into the toolkit and tested it on several different silicon Apple Macs. As expected, the most impressive machines were the more expensive Macs like the M1 Ultra Mac Studio and the 14-inch M2 Max MacBook Pro . Both were able to run Elden Ring at 60fps. Lee made Cyberpunk 2077 run at 40fps on a MacBook Pro and 71fps on a Mac Studio. Things weren’t quite as impressive with the lower-end machines, with the MacBook Air M2 hitting 26fps with Elden Ring , and the MacBook Air M1 hitting 18fps. But hey: it’s still Elden Ring on a MacBook Air.
But the raw numbers only tell half the story. This toolbox is not a simple utility to help you play PC games on your Mac; rather, it is intended to show developers how well the game runs on Apple’s silicon as is, and help them optimize the game for Mac. When you have everything up and running, you see a game written for Windows being streamed through several levels to run on a Mac, which it was never designed for.
With any luck, more developers will use this set of tools to optimize their PC games for Mac. So while you have to jump through some hoops today to run Elden Ring badly on your MacBook Air, maybe in the future you can download it from Steam and run just as good as if you had a PC to play with. on the.
What games can be played with the Game Porting Toolkit?
Unfortunately, not all of your PC games will run on your Mac at this time. According to the AppleGamingWiki’s Game Porting Toolkit guide , there are currently 36 PC games that run using this toolkit. This list includes strong players like Elden Ring , Hogwarts Legacy , and Grand Theft Auto V. But the list doesn’t seem complete: Linus Tech Tips showed Hollow Knight working on his rig, but he’s not listed on the AppleGamingWiki. There will likely be more games here, especially as more developers jump into the fray.
The Mac is generally not a great gaming machine, but these Apple machines are already showing promise with the Game Porting Toolkit:
How to run Windows games on your Apple Silicon Mac
Whether you have a Mac M1 or M2, you can try out this new set of tools today. However, this isn’t necessarily the easiest process: to get started, you’ll need to run macOS Sonoma , which is currently in beta. Installing any beta version of the OS on the machine you use every day comes with risks because bugs or other glitches can affect your ability to use the device and result in data loss. If you try this, be sure to back up your Mac beforehand.
You can register your Mac for the Sonoma Beta here . Once macOS Sonoma is up and running, you need to download the Game Porting Toolkit from the Apple Developers site . You will also need to go to the Apple Developers website here and search for “Command Line Tools for Xcode 15 Beta” and then install it. If you have an older copy of Xcode on your Mac, you will need to uninstall it.
From here, you can follow the detailed guide from AppleGamingWiki that we mentioned earlier, which walks you through the entire installation process. Let us know what games you have running on your Mac!