“Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.”
The new software will allow Mac users* (see edit) to play ‘Windows games’ on their Apple silicon (M1/M2) devices. With development, this has the potential to bring gaming to Apple.
*EDIT: The Game Porting Toolkit is designed for developers to see how their game performs on Apple silicone to entice devs to create native ports. Thanks to commenters for pointing out this distinction. The CrossOver project on which it is built, I believe, is designed for end-users to run software on their Mac clients.
You are mostly correct, but from my understanding the “Game Porting Toolkit” system isn’t just the CodeWeavers’ WINE part but also includes the Rosetta x64 to ARM translator and the D3DMetal translation layer as well. So through those layers many instructions can fall through the cracks.
All in all, neat that games can even be played on a Mac in the first place, but you still get relatively bad performance, restrictive licensing on use, worse compatibility than Proton. That’s living in Apple’s wonderful walled garden, for ya.