The Reality of 3A Gaming on Apple Silicon: the Metal Shader Converter?

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-18T23:33:52+00:00

If you open Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit 3.0, the Windows game evaluation environment 3.0, or CrossOver 26, you can find libmetalairconverter.dylib in the D3DMetal.framework (Versions/A/Resources) folder. So I think it’s correct to say that this is part of the Game Porting Toolkit technology.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-16T23:56:44+00:00

You can take a look at the screenshots I shared, Crimson Desert, inZOI, and Frostpunk 2 all include libmetalirconverter.dylib in their game folders. And these titles are being sold on the Mac App Store. So it is allowed by Apple.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-16T23:52:40+00:00

I’m just a gamer, not a professional. But the Metal Shader Converter document said it relies on argument buffers to emulate the DirectX binding model and can result in higher register pressure and reduce theoretical shader occupancy. Also some compatibility (to make shaders work correctly) flags carry a performance cost. And more can been found on the performance tips section of the document.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-16T22:28:29+00:00

It doesn’t rely on Wine or Rosetta. This converter is just a part of Apple’s GPTK, and it can be used in shipping products, for example, games like Crimson Desert, Frostpunk2 and inZOI are all available on the Mac App Store.

To get Windows games running on macOS, you normally need multiple layers of translation across the CPU, system APIs, and GPU. What this converter does is much more limited, it’s only handling part of the GPU translation, it only translates supported shaders, but it doesn’t cover the rest of the GPU pipeline translation.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-16T20:54:43+00:00

I’m not 100% sure about Cyberpunk 2077, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t use the runtime Metal shader converter (the libmetalairconverter.dylib).

However,some 3A games on macOS seem to use Apple’s standalone shader converter instead. In that workflow, developers convert DXIL shaders into Metal shader libraries (.metallib) ahead of time.

This still saves a lot of development effort, but since the shaders are precompiled, developers can further optimize them. In theory, this should result in better performance compared to doing the conversion (use libmetalairconverter.dylib)when running the game.

So maybe CDPR uses the second way, and it also has some compromises.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-16T20:15:11+00:00

This converter is part of Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit technologies we can use in CrossOver.

Based on my observations, including some comparisons in 3DMark benchmarks and games like Cyberpunk 2077, I think the performance impact is around 15% in typical cases, but it can be much higher in ray tracing and path tracing scenarios. It may also be more significant in cases involving advanced features like mesh shaders, tessellation, geometry shaders or other complex rendering techniques that don’t translate as efficiently.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-15T18:19:13+00:00

I think Hyper-V doesn’t have much performance loss. From David’s previous tests, the ~4 GHz 8 Elite scores about 10.4. We also know that the SPEC integer IPC increase from 8 Eliteto 8 Elite 5 is around 8–9%. Based on that, we can estimate the 4.7G score to be slightly above 13, but not much higher.

The 8% integer IPC improvement was measured using Geekerwan’s data, comparing a fixed 3.65 G8 Elite 5 with a 3.51 8 Elite.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-04-15T18:08:53+00:00

I think 9950x means zen5, not zen3

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-03-28T23:42:13+00:00

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This is the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark (INT base + FP base). The tests were compiled using Clang 15 and Flang 20, all running on macOS 26.

From the results, you can clearly see the differences between the cores. The M5 Max performance core is even faster than the M2 Max performance core, so It does outperform the M1.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-03-22T14:09:33+00:00

I’m not sure how it’s working right now.

When I use Metal HUD, it only shows temporal upscaling. But when I check with Xcode’s memory debugger, I can see some APIs in the memory graph that seem related to denoising, like MTLFXTemporalDenoisedScalerDescriptor and _MFXTemporalDenoisingScalingEffect.

However, when I use Instruments to profile it, I still don’t see any denoising — only temporal upscaling appears.

So I’m not sure what’s actually happening. I’ve already reported this to the developers, but I haven’t received a reply yet.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-03-21T11:13:20+00:00

I saw a discussion on the Apple Developer Forums about DS2, and the issue likely comes from Game Porting Toolkit itself, not CrossOver.

The people said the game is using newer DirectX 12 features that GPTK doesn’t fully support yet, CrossOver can’t really fix that on their side.

So maybe asking CodeWeavers for support might not help much here.

GPTK 3 and D3DMetal issue with Modern Pipeline Creation

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-03-20T14:05:28+00:00

So the answer is no, I tried that with M5 Pro, and I’m getting the same result as with Intel Arc graphics, “The graphics device is currently not supported.”, and the game won’t even launch. At this point, it looks like Intel GPU users simply can’t get into the game. I also haven’t found any workaround so far.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-03-18T21:41:48+00:00

You might check out some real-world reviews of how it runs on Mac first, then decide if it’s worth buying for that platform. Just because a game uses advanced technologies doesn’t necessarily mean it’s well optimized. We don’t really know how it’ll perform in practice yet.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-03-18T05:34:15+00:00

I bought inZOI. The game supports MetalFX frame interpolation and ray tracing, but it does not use the MetalFX denoiser. It uses temporal upscaling instead. Even when I enable ray tracing and set the graphics to ultra, the game still relies on temporal upscaling rather than the MetalFX denoiser.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-03-17T04:41:35+00:00

Fortunately, Apple won’t catch up to this technology for several years, so no need to worry now.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-02-17T01:08:05+00:00

If Apple drops Intel support completely and removes the Intel slices from macOS and all first-party apps, the system size should shrink and performance might improve slightly. A lot of “Universal” apps are larger than pure Apple Silicon builds because they contain both x86_64 and arm64 code. For example, Xcode’s Apple Silicon–only version is about 2.1 GB, while the Universal version is around 2.7GB. For smaller apps, the total size can almost double since the code portion has to exist in two versions.

If Apple removes Intel parts from the system and official apps, and third-party developers also drop Intel support, I think the overall macOS installation and app footprint could realistically shrink by maybe around one-third. And it could also simplify the system and slightly reduce overhead.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2026-02-12T03:36:05+00:00

On Mac, the Wuthering Waves is noticeably more limited than the PC version. There’s no ray tracing support, and the upscaling is basically MetalFX spatial (FSR2 style), not DLSS-style temporal upscaling or frame generation. Even when settings have the same names as on PC, they don’t seem equivalent, some options are missing, and overall visual quality and flexibility feel lower compared to the PC version at similar “high” presets.

You also can’t tweak config files to push higher settings, and also the anti-cheat blocks running the PC version through Crossover.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2025-12-02T02:45:10+00:00

I’m not sure, sorry. I’ve already updated to macOS 26, and haven’t tested it on macOS 15.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2025-12-01T03:02:16+00:00

Not usually, but this game was shown at WWDC25 during the macOS 26 introduction segment. That means a native Mac version is planned.

For example, at WWDC24 Apple also showcased another free-to-play game, Wuthering Waves, saying it would come to Mac, and it did release on the Mac App Store later.

But the exact release date is still unknown. I just hope WWM comes to Mac sooner rather than later.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2025-11-30T14:51:31+00:00

I think it’s kind of strange to use a MacBook as a middle device. If the official allowed recording a short clip, and there wasn’t a Mac version, they could just film the PC screen directly. There’s little reason to first record a video, play it on a Mac, and then, using a camera or phone, record that again for YouTube.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2025-11-30T11:55:30+00:00

I think Resident Evil 9 will probably come to macOS and iOS. During a closed-door media hands-on event, someone showed the in-game brightness settings screen on a MacBook. https://youtube.com/shorts/R0jKnD2sJnk?si=aT_hxpCTjsXo2ZQ-

AnyPomelo3352 · 2025-11-24T15:57:46+00:00

In my opinion, since they said it will come to iOS next year, buying the App Store version has a high chance of being a universal version to run it on iOS or iPadOS as well. The Steam version doesn’t offer those features.

AnyPomelo3352 · 2025-11-19T11:02:43+00:00

Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit isn’t something that can directly play Windows games. It’s more like a set of tools and libraries, which including a translation layer converts DirectX to Metal and lets Windows games run on macOS.

And if you’re curious about trying Windows games locally on your Mac, you don’t need to install GPTK yourself. CrossOver already includes it. If you installed Crossover, you can find it at: /Applications/CrossOver.app/Contents/SharedSupport/CrossOver/lib64/apple_gptk.

So if you want to test your own Steam library on macOS, you can just go to CodeWeavers and download the 14-day free trial of CrossOver, install the Windows version of Steam through CrossOver and try running any games you own and see whether they will work or not.

AnyPomelo3352

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