As previously announced last week, both No Man’s Sky and Stray will be having a macOS port but not the typical port like it is in Windows, but a full support to the Apple Silicon family of Apple’s built-in System-on-a-Chip without any interpreters.

Apple confirmed the next version of macOS with macOS Sonoma and while it is expected that many changes will come accordingly, including the newest Apple M2 Ultra unveil, but more importantly, macOS Sonoma will mean non-mobile or AAA gaming love renewed.

As expected and already confirmed by Hello Games and BlueTwelve Studios respectively with the presentation of the macOS version of No Man’s Sky and Stray, macOS Sonoma gains Metal 3.

Metal 3 is already a year old, being presented already on WWDC 2022 and landed on two version including Sonoma and Apple touted that powers hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple platforms by providing a low-overhead API, rich shading language, tight integration between graphics and compute, and an unparalleled suite of GPU profiling and debugging tools. 

And this has proven the right direction to have Apple appeal to major games developers as the list of AAA games with a macOS ports grow with:

9 games coming to Mac soon

Along with Metal 3, macOS Sonoma introduces the concept of Gaming Mode as perApple with macOS built-in Game Mode.

With Game Mode enabled in macOS 14, the Mac prioritizes CPU and GPU power for the running title, thereby improving gaming hardware performance across the board.

Apple says it has also doubled the sampling rate for paired Xbox and Playstation controllers, while a new Game Porting toolkit for developers makes it easier to port games from other platforms.

Some of macOS Sonoma's new features.

Also, macOS Sonoma includes improved screensavers and updated widgets that are more interactable where, for example,  can place these widgets anywhere on the desktop and they will automatically adjust color to fade into the background when you need them. 

There will also be further parallelism between apps on your iPhone and your Mac computer.

And about improvements on Safari, it doubles down privacy for users by locking pages when you aren’t using them to avoid further tracking. 

There will also be profiles that will allow you to separate tracking into separate buckets and you can also now create a web app for any website by simply going to the website and adding it to your dock.