At WWDC, Apple announced various initiatives to bring more games to Apple devices, and among them was Game Porting Toolkit 2, a tool that makes it easier for developers to port games to Apple silicon devices. While the WWDC keynote didn't go into great depth about it, it has been pointed out that a new feature is arriving that appears to be supported starting with M4 and later Apple silicon.

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Possibility of Further Progress in Porting AAA Windows Games

Vadim Yuryev of Max Tech quoted a post by creative director ANDRE ELIJAH, highlighting Game Porting Toolkit 2's support for the AVX2 instruction set.

The AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions 2) instruction set is a SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instruction set extension developed by Intel, and is an improved version of AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions). By utilizing this, some games can run even more smoothly.

Apple has adopted Armv9's AVX2 support for the first time starting with the M4 chip, which was first introduced in the iPad Pro.

The M4 chip has already introduced support for Armv9's SME (Scalable Matrix Extension), which is said to significantly contribute to improved CPU performance.

With this new instruction set support, Apple silicon from the M4 onward could enable the porting of the latest games such as "Starfield" and "Alan Wake 2."

Unfortunately, according to Yuryev, this AVX2 instruction set is not supported on the M1, M2, or M3 chipsets, with M4 being the first Apple silicon to support it. The M4 is Apple's first silicon to adopt the Armv9 architecture, and its ability to execute more complex workloads more efficiently has led to significant improvements in both single-core and multi-core performance.

Sources