Game Porting Toolkit
Tools and guidance for evaluating Windows games on Apple silicon and porting them to Mac, iPad and iPhone.
Overview
Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's set of tools and resources for bringing advanced games to Mac, iPad and iPhone. Its evaluation environment for Windows games runs an unmodified Windows executable on Apple silicon, so developers can get a baseline for performance, check that shaders convert correctly, and debug and profile with Metal tools such as the Metal Performance HUD, Metal debugger and Metal System Trace.
For the port itself, Metal shader converter turns DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) into Metal libraries, Metal-cpp gives C++ access to Metal and MetalFX, and game porting example code shows how to map display, input and audio subsystems to Apple frameworks. Version 4 adds open-source agent skills on Apple's GitHub, command-line access to Metal capture and debugging tools, and Metal 4 support in the evaluation environment.
Evaluation environment
Runs an unmodified Windows game on Apple silicon to gauge performance and shaders.
Shader conversion
Metal shader converter turns DXIL shaders into Metal libraries for Apple devices.
Metal tools
Metal HUD, GPU capture and System Trace help debug and profile during evaluation.
Agent skills
Open-source skills on Apple's GitHub help AI coding agents through each porting step.
History
How it grew up.
Toolkit introduced
Metal introduces a game porting toolkit to evaluate how existing games could run on Mac.
Version 2
Game Porting Toolkit 2 extends porting of advanced games to iPhone and iPad as well as Mac.
Version 3
Game Porting Toolkit 3 updates the evaluation and profiling tools and adds Metal 4 support.
Version 4
Game Porting Toolkit 4 adds open-source agent skills and command-line Metal tools.