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Macs just got a big boost for Windows gaming

Tests of Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit 4 beta show major gains, including GTA V jumping from about 106 fps to 176 fps on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

Image: 9to5Mac

Gaming remains one of the last major reasons to stick with Windows over a Mac, but new testing suggests that gap is narrowing fast. According to Macworld’s Filipe Esposito, Windows games now run better than ever on Macs, both through official porting efforts and through unofficial use by gamers themselves.

Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is designed to help developers see how well their Windows titles might perform on macOS, with the broader goal of making Mac ports easier to build. But the tool has also become a way for some users to run Windows games directly on a Mac without an official port.

Esposito said the latest Game Porting Toolkit 4 beta delivers a major performance jump after several days of testing on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

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“After spending several days testing Game Porting Toolkit 4 beta on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro, I found performance improvements that fundamentally change the experience of playing demanding Windows games […] Using the same M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 24GB of RAM, the same game settings, and the same benchmark tests, GTA V jumped from roughly 106 frames per second under GPTK 3 to around 176 fps with GPTK 4 beta. That’s an increase of about 66%. The game was running smoothly on medium to high settings at 2K resolution.”

— Filipe Esposito, Macworld

That kind of gain will not apply to every game, Esposito noted. Still, he said the results could help convince more studios to treat the Mac as a viable gaming platform.

Tomas Berg

Computing Editor

Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.

via 9to5Mac

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