CrossOver announces DirectX 12 support coming to macOS

CrossOver is a popular platform available for macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS that lets all these systems run Windows apps as if they were native. This week, CodeWeavers (the company behind CrossOver) announced that the platform will get support for Microsoft’s DirectX 12 very soon, which is good news for gamers.

CrossOver 23 coming with DirectX 12 support

For those unfamiliar, DirectX is an API available on Windows and Xbox consoles that handles graphics rendering, similar to Apple’s Metal API. DirectX 12, the latest version available, brings a lot of improvements – such as letting apps access all cores of a GPU simultaneously. This results in better performance when playing games while also enabling higher graphical quality.

Right now, CrossOver only works with DirectX 11 and previous versions. With the addition of DirectX 12 support, CrossOver users can expect even better performance when running Windows games on the Mac. However, there’s one thing to keep in mind.

According to CodeWeavers, support for DirectX 12 games will be added on a “per-title basis.” That’s because the company says the technology is quite complex and buggy, so they want to make sure users won’t have problems with it. The first game to get DirectX 12 support with CrossOver will be Diablo II Resurrected, but users can expect support for more popular titles in the future.

While we are elated with this breakthrough, we acknowledge that our journey has just begun. Our team’s investigations concluded that there was no single magic key that unlocked DirectX 12 support on macOS. To get just Diablo II Resurrected running, we had to fix a multitude of bugs involving MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross. We anticipate that this will be the case for other DirectX 12 games: we will need to add support on a per-title basis, and each game will likely involve multiple bugs.

Availability

The first beta of CrossOver 23 with DirectX 12 support will be released this summer, with the official release expected later this year. It’s worth noting that since 2020, CrossOver users can play Windows games natively on Apple Silicon Macs.

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