Most don’t for reasons elaborated at length on StackExchange. In theory it would be easier to develop originally with OpenGL, and some companies do. Macs use OpenGL, lesser-known cross-platform graphics library that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. Since this is a proprietary Microsoft product, it does not run on OS X. A great deal of Windows games use DirectX to interface with the graphics card. One of the biggest changes from Windows to OS X is the graphics engine. Designing for OS X also means taking into account a whole different set of quirks than Windows. Macs tend to use integrated graphics cards chosen for their battery life and not gaming performance. However, there is still a great deal to change. When Apple changed Mac hardware to use Intel instead of PowerPC, it made it possible to port games and reuse a good bit of the original Windows code instead of starting from scratch. Since Windows took the lion’s share of the PC market and PC gaming, games were built for Intel processors. Windows had run on Intel chips for so long that the two even had their own cutesy couple’s name, Wintel. Porting games to Mac became much easier when Apple changed from PowerPC chips to Intel’s x86 architecture in 2006. How Games Are Ported to Mac Intel architecture It goes without saying that your best bet for playing games is still Windows. There’s a couple different ways to port games to Mac, all of which have varying degrees of effectiveness. How does a computer game, one of the most complicated and intensive kinds of application you can run, get ported from Windows?
#HOW TO PLAY WINDOWS GAMES ON MAC EASY SOFTWARE#
As a Mac user, I’m always interested in how software is made for Mac.