An open-source project called nxnative lets Nintendo Switch games run on Apple Silicon Macs without going through a conventional CPU emulator. YouTuber Andrew Tsai showed four Switch games running at once in separate windows on a MacBook Pro, and according to him several titles can run at 60 frames per second simultaneously, though the exact laptop configuration was not specified.

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In the same demonstration, Monster Hunter Rise runs at 60 fps on a base M1 MacBook Air with 8 GB of unified memory, twice the 30 fps limit of the original Switch version. This detail comes from a single report and should be read as such. Other titles tested include Unicorn Overlord, Dragon Quest XI S and Dark Souls Remastered, some of which never received a native macOS release.

Switch code running directly on the chip

Unlike conventional emulators, nxnative exploits the fact that Switch and Apple Silicon processors share the ARM64 instruction architecture. Instead of translating instructions between architectures, the software adapts the game code to run on Apple's processors. The project also replaces Nintendo's Horizon OS services and translates graphics instructions from NVIDIA's NVN API to Apple's Metal API. According to the same report, it is not free of compatibility overhead, but it avoids conventional CPU emulation.

Game-specific support is growing quickly. When Tsai began preparing his video there were 40 compatibility recipes; before he finished recording they reached 58, and by October 25, when we first covered the project, the list had 61 entries. These recipes provide game-specific fixes, resolution adjustments and patches that in some cases enable 60 fps in titles originally limited to 30.

Not every game works

The project was originally built for iPhone and iPad, converting Switch game files into unsigned IPA apps, but it also supports standalone macOS applications that launch directly from the desktop. Tsai managed to run Neon White without a dedicated recipe, but being able to build an app does not guarantee a game will work. Dark Souls Remastered shows occasional graphical glitches and cannot reach Nintendo's online services, while Doom Eternal failed to launch in Tsai's tests.

Building the apps requires your own game files dumped from the console and its keys, so the project distributes no games and requires owning the source material. The project also sits within a wider scene around Switch 2 modding: earlier this year the developer pepsipu published a software exploit that opens the new console to mods and homebrew, but it needs an original game to be launched at each boot.