You can now run Switch games natively on Apple Silicon Macs without the CPU performance bottleneck of typical virtualization. That opens up performance beyond what the original machine could offer, doubling the frame rates of games for you. You can now run games that are otherwise GPU demanding on laptops that were previously capped at 30 FPS targets.
Open-source tool bypasses CPU emulation to double frame rates on M1 hardware
The software is called nxnative and it's an open source project that translates Switch game code to run natively on Apple silicon instead of translating instructions from one architecture to another (as is typical). It translates graphics instructions from the NVIDIA NVN API to Apple Metal API for the graphics rendering part. By doing so, they skip the CPU performance emulation part and use the same ARM64 instructions that are common between Nintendo Switch and Apple Silicon.
YouTuber Andrew Tsai shows the software in action with four games running at the same time at 60 FPS on Apple hardware. Monster Hunter Rise, for example, is running at 60 FPS on a base M1 MacBook Air, with 8GB of unified memory. That's double the 30 FPS cap of the original Switch game. They've gone from 40 games supported by the project to 61 games on October 25.
You have to provide your own dumped Switch games and console keys in order to compile apps for the tool. Tsai mentions that you can run multiple games at 60 FPS at the same time on the platform. It's not a 100% compatibility yet since Doom Eternal didn't even launch when he tried it. It's unclear which MacBook Pro model was used for the multi-game scenario shown.
The software provides native running of Switch games on Macs, by porting code to run on Apple processors. It translates graphics instructions from NVIDIA NVN API to Apple Metal API. You need your own dumped Switch game files and keys to use this tool.
Monster Hunter Rise is running at 60 FPS on base M1. That's double the performance of the original console game.
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