iPhone
maker
Apple
has been promoting
gaming
on its devices in 2023. In a recent interview with Inverse, the company has offered an in-depth view at its work to turn the
Mac
into a powerful gaming platform. The interview comes as Apple has put major focus on gaming throughout the year on the Mac and iPhone.
What Apple has to say to about gaming on Mac
At the interview, Mac product marketing manager at Apple, Gordon Keppel said the company’s in-house
silicon
has helped in gaming related developments.
Keppel said: “Apple silicon has changed all that. Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3.”
Meanwhile,
Leland Martin
, a software marketing manager at Apple, added that Apple Silicon has also simplified the development process for gaming companies on the Mac.
Martin said: “If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs. That can add complexity when you’re developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we’ve effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. 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.”
How Game Portal Toolkit can help game developers
During the interview, Apple managers also said that the company has put a major focus on gaming across all of its platforms in 2023. This includes the latest devices including Macs and iPhone 15.
For example, Apple launched the
Game Porting Toolkit
as part of
macOS Sonoma
. This toolkit makes it significantly easier for developers to bring games from other platforms to the Mac.
In the interview, Martin explained how Apple has already seen a boost in interest from developers due to the Game Porting Toolkit. He said: “We’ve definitely seen interest from developers and publishers like Kojima Productions (Death Stranding: Director’s Cut coming out in early 2024) and Annapurna Interactive Games (Stray) on how to take advantage of both parts of the Game Porting Toolkit. When you download the toolkit, there’s really two parts to it. There’s that emulation environment and that’s helped demonstrate today’s game — 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. And they’ve praised how incredibly useful this is and how it’s saved them a bunch of time in their development timeline.”
English (US) ·