We’re something of hardware buffs at InstallAware. Testing all that the latest and greatest generations of PCs have to offer has been a consistent pastime in the history of the company. And what better benchmark to measure GPU performance than Futuremark’s (well, now UL’s) 3DMark series of products?
When we at Skunkworks started building InstallAware Multi Platform, we introduced Macs for the first time to the company coffers. The rest of the team were shocked to hear that Macs had no standard benchmark test like 3DMark! Surely this had to be a mistake?
“Nope,” we had to assure them, as their Skunkworks compatriots. This was no mistake. Macs just had no established 3D benchmark application like 3DMark. Some of us even reached out to UL directly (in an unofficial capacity, of course), in disbelief at this state of affairs, over the course of the years. Sadly, our worst fears were confirmed. Those were the breaks! Indeed, there was no 3DMark for macOS, and there were no plans for one either!
At one point, we had even created our own CPU benchmark at Skunkworks (that’s when we discovered reliable cross platform benchmarking turns out to be an extremely difficult undertaking) – but this was a far cry (pun intended!) from looking at pretty graphics rolling by on a bleeding edge device.
Enter InstallAware‘s Application Porting Toolkit. As of this writing, it’s hot off the press – and has been cause for much joy and celebration at our offices. One of the test case applications we validated our kit against was, of course, 3DMark! And now, we’re finally able to run 3D Mark on Macs. While, due to some issues with it as we’ve described below, 3DMark was not destined to become the showcase application featured in our Application Porting Toolkit Whitepaper; it yet earns a well-deserved spot on this blog – looking at how beautifully it does run on Macs, and how easy the porting process has been made, thanks to all the work we’ve done as Skunkworks on the Application Porting Toolkit.
If you’re as much of a hardware buff as many of us are here, please don’t hold back from replicating our results, directly on whatever Macs you have available on-hand. This post is laced with tips and tricks to reproduce our findings (not that many are needed, again thanks to the quality of the current kit). Here’s the hardware we used:
M4 “Airmax” 13′ Pale Blue MacBook Air – 32 GB RAM, 2 TB Storage, 10 Core CPU with 10 Core GPU (try to have at least 100 GB free disk space at start, all things considered)
As for the software:
InstallAware Studio Admin X17 (for high performance setup capture with PackageAware)
InstallAware 2025 Multi Platform 2.65 (for the Application Porting Toolkit)
UL 3DMark 2.32.8454 Professional Edition (for command line support)
Emphasis on command line support because, without it, the funny shell that the 3DMark folk are using nowadays won’t show properly on your Mac:
That solid, jet black is, I guess, the Wine (Windows compatibility layer) equivalent of TV static?
What’s funny is, the same 3DMark GUI does look much better inside a macOS 26 Tahoe VM, albeit with glitches:
That is, after you dismiss multiple popups that look like the below, which are going to be hidden behind the main window, mind you (tip!):
And sadly, macOS virtualization still leaves a lot to be desired on Apple Silicon – so the actual benchmarks themselves won’t run inside the Tahoe VM, no matter how good the shell looks.
Getting back to our required list of software downloads, either VMware or Parallels works for virtualization:
VMware Fusion Professional 13.6.4
or
Parallels Desktop 26.1.1 (57288)
Please feel free to go with either one (VMware is now totally free, as in beer; so that helps – although 3D performance inside Windows guests with VMware falls substantially behind Parallels, so we’ll be using Parallels to compare benchmark numbers with the host device later on (tip!) – and again, sadly, using VMware for macOS virtualization on Apple Silicon is kind of a non-starter, so we used Parallels for the virtualized Tahoe screenshots above, too).
We still love VMware, though 🙂
So, with all downloads completed; following in the footsteps of the venerable Application Porting Toolkit Whitepaper, we now execute the following steps:
- “Provision” (gotta love that word) a clean Windows 11 VM.
- Scan that VM with InstallAware Studio Admin X17‘s PackageAware to save a pre-install snapshot.
- Install 3DMark Professional inside of the Windows 11 VM.
- Update the PackageAware scan and save the post-install snapshot.
- Compare the two snapshots and create a portable project.
- TAR that folder up and move it to your host Mac, UNTAR it there. After that, please feel free to save the Windows 11 VM for future benchmark score comparisons (tip!), or to wipe it off the surface of the Earth at this stage (especially if you’re pressed for storage space).
- Run InstallAware 2025 Multi Platform‘s Application Porting Toolkit on your host Mac, importing the UNTAR’red setup.
- Build the imported setup, run it, and install it on your host Mac.
Just a clarification that the above uses the “Mode 3” workflow (tip!) as mentioned in the Application Porting Toolkit Whitepaper (using setup capture). If you naively attempted the “Mode 1” workflow (running the UL 3DMark setup directly), you’ll see Wine instantly chokes on the 3DMark installer – making it impossible for us to proceed:
So anyways, now you’re ready to start benchmarking! That wasn’t too bad, was it 😉
What’s interesting here is that not all of the benchmarks work – but most of the newest, DirectX 12 based benchmarks do (tip!).
This is to be expected, since the Apple folk have done a great job with their Game Porting Toolkit in translating DX12 instructions to native macOS calls with their custom patched instance of Wine – kudos!
Also a huge shout out to Gokhan Avkarogullari, who’s behind the GPU team at Apple. Clearly as the benchmarks are about to show, they’ve done a really great job here.
So what do we do next? Since the 3DMark GUI won’t run, let’s dive right into the command line. Open up a Terminal, and type (from any folder you like):
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=firestrike.3dmdef
Let’s decipher that command line. First off, the above example assumes that you created a custom Wine instance named “3dmark kpojluk repack” (tip!) as part of your Application Porting Toolkit flow. If you used the default instance of Wine instead (which also happens to be the default setting of the Application Porting Toolkit), just replace all instances of “3dmark kpojluk repack” found in the command lines we’re going to use with “wine” – while paying attention to retaining the preceding dot, which is part and parcel of the Wine instance path name. So the same command above with that default would look like:
“/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=firestrike.3dmdef
And yes, in the default form above, we omitted the WINEPREFIX parameter altogether, as it’s not generally required when working with the default instance of Wine (tip!).
Oh one last important note – be sure to replace /Users/me with whatever your actual user folder name is on your Mac. You can see this by typing “pwd” as soon as you’ve brought Terminal up. It’ll show something like:
/Users/me
If your user folder was indeed called me.
Getting back on track here, as soon as you execute this command, 3DMark stars loading up – first you see a lot of Wine diagnostic text scroll by in your console, and then bingo!
Yes, that was our tear jerker moment here at InstallAware Skunkworks. Call us nerds all you want, we know we are.
Everything from that moment onwards runs nominally, as you would expect. When the run is done, you end up with a file like this:
/Users/me/Documents/3DMark/3DMark-FireStrike-5206-20251027030354.3dmark-result
Since this is the command line after all, you don’t get a nice GUI score. BUT, if you move this file (looks like it’s just a ZIP file after all) to a PC (or your Windows 11 VM provisioned above) with 3DMark installed, you can just double-click it, and view the actual score that was obtained during your run:
Now let’s compare this Fire Strike performance with Parallels itself running 3DMark, on the same M4 Airmax, albeit inside a Windows 11 VM:
Oh wow, will you look at that! We’ve outperformed Parallels by an easy 25%! Again, congrats Gokhan & co!
To be honest I wouldn’t have expected a DX11 benchmark to outperform Parallels GPU virtualization like this. Let’s take a look at some DX12 benchmarks next then, shall we?
Sad is that the “industry standard” Time Spy doesn’t run. But other DX12 benchmarks do! Picking something that we can again compare with Parallels’ performance, let’s go with Night Raid:
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=nightraid.3dmdef
Inside Parallels, with GPU virtualization:
On bare metal (pun intended!), with the Application Porting Toolkit:
That’s…not exactly what we were expecting after the immediate precedent, but the fact that Parallels displayed a black screen (instead of rendered graphics) might have had something to do with it having outperformed Metal on Wine here?
It’s actually pretty cool that we can run more advanced DX12 benchmarks with the Application Porting Toolkit, but NOT on Parallels. Anything that requires ray tracing, for example, is currently a no-go with Parallels. That would ordinarily leave us with Steel Nomad as the only other DX12 comparison point, but Parallels can’t seem to run that at all – not even as a black screen.
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=steelnomad_dx12.3dmdef
Here’s the Steel Nomad score we got with Wine/Metal via the Application Porting Toolkit:
So let’s now check out a few of the higher-end DX12 benchmarks that run through Metal/Wine with the Application Porting Toolkit only.
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=portroyal.3dmdef
Super respectable score at nearly 2,000! You can tell the ray tracing support in the M4 CPU is delivering the goods here.
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=speedway.3dmdef
The lowest score of the DX12 ray tracing bunch happens to be the currently most demanding 3DMark benchmark of all, not surprisingly.
We can even run Intel XeSS, and nVIDIA DLSS feature tests – clearly the Wine/Metal bridge supports those as well (although, no AMD feature sets seem to run successfully). Let’s continue our survey with some screenshots from those tests in action.
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=intelxessft.3dmdef
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=nvidiadlss.3dmdef
Noteworthy to observe here is that these feature tests realize far greater frames per second with their particular optimizations turned off (namely XeSS and DLSS), presumably because those optimizations aren’t available on Apple Silicon.
It is also possible to run GPU vendor agnostic feature tests.
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=apioverhead.3dmdef
The API overhead test produces a couple of black screens – feel free to Force Kill the wine64-preloader process when that happens, to chug things forward (tip!) – but does start rendering when DX12 enters the fray.
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=vrs.3dmdef
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=meshshaderft.3dmdef
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=directxraytracingft.3dmdef
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=samplerfeedbackft.3dmdef
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=pciexpress.3dmdef
Last but not least, we can even test DirectStorage! This test does implode the moment DirectStorage is activated though, leaving us with a generic disk I/O benchmark for macOS – totally worthwhile in its own right.
WINEPREFIX=”/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack” “/Applications/Game Porting Toolkit.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64” “/Users/me/.3dmark kpojluk repack/drive_c/Program Files/UL/3DMark/3DMarkCmd.exe” –definition=directstorageft.3dmdef
That’s about it for all the tests we ran on our last pass 🙂
Be sure to try this out on your own top-of-the-line (or not) Macs, and compare your findings amongst CPU/GPU and device hardware generations 😀
Careful though, the benchmarking bug might just bite you 😉
Contributed By: John Gaver
for InstallAware Skunkworks