Game Porting Toolkit - Games - Apple Developer

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Bring your advanced games to Mac, iPad, and iPhone

The Game Porting Toolkit makes it easier than ever to bring games to the unified gaming platform across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Take advantage of improved compatibility, expanded guidance, and updated tools.

Download Game Porting Toolkit 4

Download the Metal Developer Tools for Windows

What’s new

Game Porting Toolkit 4 dramatically cuts the time, effort, and cost of bringing your game to Apple platforms.

A new companion repository on Apple's GitHub brings together open-source agent skills and sample code to help you leverage AI coding agents throughout the porting process, so you can produce higher-quality ports and ship on Apple platforms faster.

New agent skills provide best practices and deep Metal knowledge for every step of the porting experience, helping your agents meaningfully speed up your time to first playable. And with new command-line access for Metal tools, agents can now capture, debug, and profile Metal workloads directly.

The evaluation environment now supports Metal 4, allowing you to test compatibility and performance against the latest API from the very start of your porting process.

Get started easily

Use new game porting skills to bring best practices and deep Metal knowledge to every stage of the porting process, greatly reducing the time it takes to you to bring your game to the unified gaming platform. And with command-line access for Metal tools, agents can now capture and debug Metal workloads directly.

Run your Windows binary on the evaluation environment for Windows games to get a baseline estimate for performance, and verify that your shaders convert correctly. You can now take your game evaluation even further by using Metal tools such as Metal Performance HUD, Metal debugger, and Metal System Trace.

Review the Human Interface Guidelines to learn how to deliver an outstanding experience across Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Leverage the Mac Remote Developer Tools for Windows to build and debug your game on macOS remotely from within Microsoft Visual Studio on PC.

Use the game porting example code to learn how to map your game subsystems to Apple frameworks. Metal shader converter helps you bring your HLSL shaders to Metal. If you’re experienced in C++, Metal-cpp provides a familiar interface to get started with the Metal framework.

Learn what you can do with the toolkit

Whether you’re making a new cross-platform game or porting an existing one, the Game Porting Toolkit 3 is the best way to bring your game to Apple devices.

Leverage game porting agent skills

A companion repository on Apple’s GitHub brings together open-source agent skills and sample code to help you work with AI coding agents throughout the porting process — so you can produce higher-quality ports and ship on Apple platforms faster. Use these skills to port from DirectX to Metal, debug directly with Metal command-line tools, add game controller support, polish the player experience, and optimize your game.

Speedrun your game port with agentic coding

View downloads on GitHub

Evaluate your Windows executable on Apple silicon

To find out how your game performs on Apple silicon or if your graphics are portable, evaluate your unmodified Windows executable on Apple silicon using the evaluation environment for Windows games. You can test your game, understand its performance, and validate your shaders.

In addition to existing features such as, sparse buffers and textures, performance insights, HDR, upscaling, denoising, and frame generation, the latest version brings full Metal 4 support.

You can even start debugging and profiling your game while in evaluation using Metal tools, such as Metal HUD, Metal GPU capture, and Metal System Trace. And there are even more ways to get started with this evaluation environment when you use community projects (like Homebrew) and products (like CrossOver from CodeWeavers). To learn more, watch Port advanced games to Apple platforms.

Download the evaluation environment for Windows games

Design your game for Apple devices

Players expect your game to feel right at home on their devices. An expanded set of Human Interface Guidelines focuses on designing for games to help you delight your players and keep them coming back for more. Get details on key topics, from how to best support fullscreen gaming content to designing great on-screen virtual controls gamers will love.

Designing for games on Apple devices

Learn from game porting code examples

These examples are based on our learnings from working with developers that simultaneously shipped their high-end games on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. You’ll learn essential steps, like how to convert your Windows display, input, and audio APIs, and how to build your shaders once and deploy everywhere.

Build and run on Mac, then iPad and iPhone

Now it’s even easier to deploy from Mac to iPad and...