What Is macOS Game Mode?
Macs aren't known as gaming machines given the fact that a large portion of games are not natively compatible with macOS. If you're determined enough, you can get some games to work, but it's mostly a huge pain. Macs have generally been best suited for creative endeavors and productivity, and while that's not changing, Apple is taking a new step toward making gaming on Mac a tad more appealing.
The company's newly announced macOS Sonoma will include a new feature called Game Mode that is designed to optimize gaming performance by shifting the GPU and CPU to prioritize the game. This, hopefully, will result in higher, more consistent frame rates while you're playing.
As well, Game Mode can also lower the latency between the Mac and Bluetooth peripherals like AirPods and Xbox/PlayStation controllers. Game Mode does this by doubling the Bluetooth sample rate, according to the company. The addition of this new mode makes sense, as the newest line of Macs has a substantial amount of horsepower and it'd seem like a waste if you couldn't do at least some decent gaming with it.
Faster porting may mean a growing Mac games library
In practice, this will work like the gaming-centric software that already exists on many gaming PCs. According to Apple, it works with any game you install on your Mac and is not locked to any specific title or developer. Whether this addition alone will be enough to bolster gaming on macOS is yet to be seen, but the change does not exist in isolation, as the company also announced something for devs.
During Apple's WWDC keynote, a new Gaming Porting Toolkit was announced that, as its name suggests, exists to make it easier for developers to port their games to macOS. The new Metal 3 toolkit will, according to Apple, enable devs to see how their title functions on Mac after only a "few days" of work, and will make it easier to port games to Mac with the ability to "take full advantage of Apple silicon performance."
The key upside here is that it'll drastically cut down on how much time teams have to spend porting their games, which may pave the way for a greater number of games that natively support Mac desktops and laptops. With titles like Hideo Kojima's "Death Stranding," "Stray," and "No Man's Sky" coming to the OS, the future is looking fairly bright for gamers who own a Mac.