Important (but cool) updates about Apple Silicon/Mac OS Sonoma and Porting Kit.

Here an heads-up info post about the current situation about Apple Silicon Macs, Mac OS Sonoma and Porting Kit 6. Lets start with the Combo of Apple Silicon Macs and Mac OS Sonoma.

Mac OS 14 Sonoma in combination with Apple Silicon Macs.
With the release of Mac OS Sonoma recently (last month) there has been some VERY important changes especially for Apple Silicon Macs. Firstly some changes in Rosetta made some games work again, like Fallout and  Fallout 2 for only Apple Silicon Macs. Besides that with the arrival of D3D Metal GPTK support, there are a massive amount of especially Directx11 and Directx12, which will work awesome on Apple Silicon Macs (Not intel based Macs unfortunately)! Massive Titles with (sometimes almost) Native performance! These will be all added to Porting Kit soon and when already there updated with great performance. So again, when you have an Apple silicon it’s a MUST to go to Mac OS 14 Sonoma! So make sure to check your Mac OS version and when it is lower then Mac OS Sonoma, update your OS to Mac OS Sonoma NOW!

Porting Kit 5 and 6
Now some updates about Porting Kit 5 and 6. Development of Porting Kit 6, hasn’t stopped for a minute, and contains a lot of fixes and extra’s from which Porting Kit 5 still suffers from. So we are getting a bigger and bigger gap between Porting Kit 5 and 6. For example the support D3D Metal Engines, which isn’t supported in Porting Kit 5! Or the Mojave/High Sierra support which is still partly given through some workarounds (more about that later in this post). However Porting Kit 6 still needs to get some important fixes before we can release it to production (like some banner issues on local library). So we are finding ourselves just in the middle of the crossroads.

For Apple Silicon I advice to go to the Experimental PK 6.13 (you can turn that on in the Porting Kit options). Which still have a couple of bugs, but you can at least make use of the awesome new capabilities of D3D Metal. We hope soon to come with the good news to put Porting Kit 6 to production including the necessary fixes to have the stable basics in place. The rest will follow in new updates. Also if you want to play around with your Steam games in combination with GPTK/D3D Metal, then install the “Steambuild 32/64bit Metal” port and install your games into that port to test if your games now will work or have better performance. Let us know when your titles are working which aren’t in the database yet. Then we can add them as community ports.

Decrease support High Sierra 10.13 and Mojave 10.14.
With the good news, there is also some bad news. As already mentions on the Porting Kit website, because of the process/advancement of Wine for the newer OS, we simply cannot keep up the support for legacy Mac version, it takes tremendous efforts and time to keep support for these OS versions in the latest engines. That’s why new games and updates games might not have High Sierra/Mojave Support. The games which still work in older engines for both Mac and Apple Silicon, will still have support for the old Mac OS versions, but game clients like Steam/Origin and Ubisoft Connect, are already out of grace because of the requirement of the latest Wine Engines. Still a lot of GOG.com will still be Mojave/High Sierra compatible, but through time, this will decrease as well. So when you have the possibility to go to at least Mac OS Catalina, then please do so! 

Because of the Importance of this post, we will keep this post sticky for a while.

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