Apple’s WWDC this year was packed with announcements, so it’s only natural some slip through the cracks. Over the course of the event, Apple quietly unveiled a new tool that could finally make gaming possible on Apple Silicon. This tool is a translation layer for DirectX12, one of the world’s most popular gaming APIs. This means that games made for Windows can now run directly on Apple Silicon through the Metal3 graphics API. 

Apple’s translation layer comes after the community has slowly been chipping away at the big problem of running DirectX on Apple hardware. While this has been done in the past through projects like Wine, such projects have largely fallen out of favour since the launch of Apple Silicon. 

The translation layer comes as a part of the Mac Game Porting Toolkit announced at the conference. This toolkit will allow developers to port their Windows games easily to Mac, providing various binaries and primitives to allow devs to leverage Apple hardware. 

According to the companies, these tools will help developers to evaluate how well their game will run on Mac hardware, and to simplify the process of converting apps’ shaders and graphics code to Mac. In addition to this, the toolkit also helps game developers to cut down development times for Mac. 

In classic Apple fashion, they made the announcement with many top games coming to Mac this year. In addition to this, they invited one of the gaming world’s biggest celebrities, Hideo Kojima, to speak about his efforts to bring his biggest game ‘Death Stranding’ to Mac with the game porting toolkit. 

While researchers have been hard at work reverse engineering the Apple chip to build out a set of graphics drivers, it seems that Apple beat them to the punch. It seems that this isn’t stopping the researchers though, as they continue to pull back the curtain on the secrets of Apple Silicon. 

With the launch of the gaming toolkit and DirectX translation layer, Apple has opened the doors for game developers to target a completely new market that they have largely ignored until now.

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