Game Porting Toolkit 3 will help devs port games from Windows to Mac easier. Image source: Apple
WWDC 2025 revealed some upgraded tools for game developers that’ll make games render at higher resolutions, faster frame rates, and improved ray tracing with fewer resources.
Apple didn’t make that’t much time for games during the WWDC 2025 keynote, but there are details surfacing about Apple’s upgraded gaming APIs. Metal 4 and Game Porting Toolkit 3 are both here with updates that should make game development and execution easier.
Metal 4 is an API that lets developers build complex graphical interfaces or games with low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated processes. Game Porting Toolkit 3 is a tool that lets developers test and work to port games from external development platforms into Apple’s.
Each of these APIs will help developers build better-running games. Whether the developer is starting from scratch or porting a game from Windows, it should be easier thanks to these updates.
The Game Porting Toolkit 3 update focuses on helping developers better understand how their game is running given different tools in use. The Metal Performance Hud is now customizable, and onscreen insights will help the dev make decisions about optimization.
Developers can also use Mac Remote Developer Tools for Windows to build Mac games on a remote Mac in their existing development workflows. Game Porting Toolkit 3 supports sparse buffers, sparse textures, performance insights for Windows games, and experimental support for the new MetalFX tools mentioned later.
By helping developers understand more about their existing games and what optimizations need to be made to port them, Apple will help bring more games to its platforms. The process should be as smooth as possible, and Game Porting Toolkit 3 seems to help address some dev needs.
Metal 4 has several new features that streamline the API and aim to help developers easily achieve optimal performance on Apple Silicon with lower overhead command encoding and scalable resource management. Machine learning support has also been added with native support for tensors in both the API and shading language.
Ray Tracing could improve for any Apple Silicon thanks to Metal 4. Image source: Apple
The MetalFX systems gain two new functions — Frame Interpolation and Denoising. These will help games run smoother with more graphical fidelity.
A game’s frame rate can greatly impact how well a game feels to the user. MetalFX Frame Interpolation helps smooth out the game by generating an intermediate frame for every two input frames.
Ray tracing is another important part of rendering a game by ensuring an environment looks and feels more realistic with directional and reflective lighting effects. MetalFX Denoising makes real-time ray tracing and path tracing possible in advanced games.
What this means for gamers
All of this is great for developers, of course, but it’s even better for gamers. Developers will be able to build games that run better on Apple Silicon, which means improved games and experiences for users.
New and improved dev tools mean better games for everyone
Improvements to the Game Porting Toolkit will hopefully mean more ports more often. AAA titles on Mac, iPhone, and iPad have been slow coming.
Metal 4 sounds like it’ll be exciting for game developers. Even for platforms like Apple Vision Pro, which runs an M2 processor that was released before Apple added hardware-accelerated ray tracing to its chips, Metal 4 will help.
Ray tracing is an advanced technology used across most modern games for lighting the world and handling reflections. It’s an intensive process, so Metal 4 making it more efficient, will improve games for everyone even on chips like M2 that render in software.
The frame interpolation feature is another modernization of Apple’s API. Some companies say they add frames with “AI,” though it seems Apple had some restraint and called it good old-fashioned machine learning.
It’ll be interesting to see how developers take advantage of these new updates. It’s all pretty low-level stuff, so users may not notice any changes anytime soon, if at all.
Developers can begin working with the new APIs introduced during WWDC 2025 starting now. The developer betas will go through the summer, and new apps and games utilizing these upgrades will begin rolling out alongside macOS Tahoe in the fall.
