In a major boost to gaming on Macs, CrossOver has today announced that the upcoming version of the platform will support DirectX 12 on macOS. This will massively improve the experience of those who play Windows games on macOS.
Better gaming experience on Macs
For the unaware, DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces or APIs that smoothens the game playing experience of users on the Windows platform by utilizing the hardware components of a PC to their maximum potential. It is comparable to Apple’s Metal API, which handles graphics rendering on macOS. The latest version- DirectX 12, which was launched back in 2015, brings console-level efficiency to phones, tablets, and PC. It allows users to access multiple the power of multiple CPU and GPU cores simultaneously. This is beneficial, especially for those with multi-core CPUs. CodeWeavers, the company behind CrossOver, made the announcement in a blog post detailing that CrossOver 23 will bring DirectX 12 support to macOS starting this summer. “A year and a half ago, we announced that we were working hard on DirectX 12 support for CrossOver Mac and shared some details about some of the challenges our team was facing. We speculated that we could have DirectX 12 support as early as CrossOver 23, and I’m thrilled to announce that we have made some real progress. We have the beginnings of DirectX 12 support, and our QA team has confirmed that Diablo II Resurrected is running on macOS with early pre-alpha builds of CrossOver 23, which will be released later this summer.” However, the CodeWeavers also said that the DirectX 12 support on macOS will be released per-title basis due the complex process of sorting out bugs involving MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross. The company said that there is no single magic key to port DirectX 12 support on macOS. It had to fix several bugs to run Diablo II Resurrected on a Mac device using CrossOver 23. Despite the limited approach initially, DirectX 12 support on Mac is a piece of good news for gamers. Currently, the platform supports DirectX 11 for playing games. With DirectX 12, users can expect a major boost in gaming performance and graphics rendering. CrossOver will release the first beta of CrossOver 23 with DirectX 12 support this summer.
