A word of warning: Apple's Game Porting Toolkit requires a lot of setup, It took me a long time to set up, and that's thanks to the sheer amount of work it takes to get running. The Apple Gaming Wiki has a fantastic guide to get it set up that I used, and while you can technically force it to run on Ventura, it will break a lot of Steam games and just simply isn't supported. It's a less user-friendly method to play games than using Parallels or Crossover, but the payoff is, in my opinion, worth it.
I ran this on my personal MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 Pro with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, so if you have better specs than those, you can expect even better performance.
Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man: Remastered on the Macbook M1 Pro
The two games that I tried out on my Macbook M1 Pro were Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man: Remastered, and I was impressed by the results. Both games were completely playable at around 30 FPS on high settings (though I tried dropping them to low settings in order to increase performance), and I didn't do much by way of optimization.
As you can see from the clip above, the game is very playable and runs well while still looking gorgeous. It also didn't help that I was playing on a trackpad, but you will be able to use a mouse and keyboard just fine with any games that you play. Note that audio is absent from the above clip, but the audio sounded fine, though a bit crackly.
In the above clip, the audio sounds poor but sounded just fine when actually playing. As well, it's worth pointing out that while the game seems to struggle performance-wise at the start, it picks up and maintains about 30 FPS halfway through the video. Also, note that you can't play games with a controller just yet without a lot of work. I'm not quite sure of the steps myself yet; some people claim you can compile the Game Porting Toolkit with the '--with-sdl2' compilation option, so maybe give that a try if you have the know-how.
As for how Apple's game Porting Toolkit works, it's very similar to Proton on the Steam Deck. It makes use of Wine as a base to translate Windows API calls to POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) calls and then translates DirectX calls to Apple's Metal API. Wine recreates a Windows directory structure and provides alternative implementations of system services, and it doesn't use any emulation or virtualization to execute Windows binaries. Don't forget as well, that on Apple Silicon, it then has to take another step to translate from x86 to Arm.
Proton on the Steam Deck does the same thing, except DirectX calls are translated to Vulkan instead of Metal. The biggest difference between Proton and GPKT is that Proton is aimed at consumers and is designed as a consumer-facing project to play games on a Linux-based machine. In the case of GPKT, it's a difficult, very hands-on process that is aimed at developers to test their games as a way to incentivize them to develop for Mac.
Having said that, it's clear that if you're willing to get your hands dirty and try it out, it looks very much like it's worth it to set up GPKT and play Windows-based games on your Mac. If big titles like Cyberpunk can run on it, then there's no reason to believe that you can't play a huge swathe of your gaming library on a Mac either. Whether you want to or not is a different story, but it does work.
