How do I run a Windows game on a Mac with CrossOver?

The fastest route is to let CrossOver install the game for you: search its built-in installer by name and it creates the bottle, installs the store the game needs, and applies that game’s known dependencies in one pass. If it is not listed, install the store instead. Pick Steam, the Epic Games Launcher or GOG Galaxy, let the script build the bottle, then sign in and install from your library. Keep one game per bottle: graphics settings apply bottle-wide. Pick the graphics backend before you launch. In the bottle, open Advanced Settings, then Graphics, and choose Auto, DXMT, D3DMetal, DXVK or Wine.

Why does a game render white textures or run in slow motion under CrossOver?

The bottle is on a graphics backend this game does not get along with. Switch it in Advanced Settings and relaunch. Raft renders white textures until the bottle moves to DirectX 11 with DXVK; Sons of the Forest runs in slow motion on D3DMetal and wants DXMT; The Witcher 3 needs DirectX 11 rather than its DirectX 12 default.

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How CrossOver works on a Mac

Q: Is CrossOver free?

No. CrossOver is paid software with a free, fully functional 14-day trial, after which the Windows applications you installed stop launching. CodeWeavers sells CrossOver+ (twelve months of updates and support) and CrossOver Life (lifetime support). On 8 August 2026 CodeWeavers’ store showed a United States visitor $74.00 and $494.00; the CrossOver+ price is geo-varied, and the same page served $54.00 in South Africa, so check your own region.

CrossOver lets an Apple Silicon Mac run Windows games without installing Windows. What it is, the steps to get a game running, and the fixes for what goes wrong.

Versions and prices checked against primary sources on 8 August 2026. Every fix below comes from a game we verified ourselves. Every source is listed at the foot of the page.

What CrossOver is

CrossOver is paid software from CodeWeavers that runs Windows games on macOS by translating their Windows instructions into macOS ones as they execute. It is built on the open-source Wine project. It is not an emulator and not a virtual machine: no copy of Windows is involved, and the game talks to your Mac’s real GPU, so performance on Apple Silicon is often close to native. There is a free 14-day trial, so you can test the game you care about before paying.

How to run a Windows game, step by step

The fastest route is to let CrossOver install the game for you: search its built-in installer by name and it creates the bottle, installs the store the game needs, and applies that game’s known dependencies in one pass. Every setting named below is documented in CodeWeavers’ own CrossOver Mac user guide.

Install CrossOver and start the trial.Download it, unzip, open it and choose “Move to Applications Folder”. It runs fully functional until you sign in with a CodeWeavers account to unlock it. Download the free trial →
Search the installer for your game.Click Install, type its name, and accept the defaults if CodeWeavers has a script: CrossOver creates a fresh bottle and installs the launcher that game needs. A bottle is a self-contained virtual Windows environment with its own C: drive and registry, and is what Wine calls a prefix.
If it is not listed, install the store instead.Pick Steam, the Epic Games Launcher or GOG Galaxy, let the script build the bottle, then sign in and install from your library. Keep one game per bottle: graphics settings apply bottle-wide.
Pick the graphics backend before you launch.In the bottle, open Advanced Settings, then Graphics, and choose Auto, DXMT, D3DMetal, DXVK or Wine. Auto uses CodeWeavers’ per-game database and is the right first try.
Turn on MSync, and DLSS if the game supports it.Both are in the same panel. CodeWeavers notes MSync helps some applications and does nothing for others; MetalFX-powered DLSS works only with D3DMetal and DXMT.
Launch it, and give the first start time.A first launch can sit on a black screen while shaders compile: Monster Hunter: World reliably takes three to four minutes before the Capcom logo. Test before the 14 days run out.

Common problems, and what to try

Most CrossOver failures fall into a handful of shapes, and the graphics backend is behind more of them than anything except anti-cheat.

Textures render white, or the game runs in slow motion

Cause: The bottle is on a graphics backend this game does not get along with.
Fix: Switch it in Advanced Settings and relaunch. Raft renders white textures until the bottle moves to DirectX 11 with DXVK; Sons of the Forest runs in slow motion on D3DMetal and wants DXMT; The Witcher 3 needs DirectX 11 rather than its DirectX 12 default.

It crashes the moment you launch it

Cause: A required backend and synchronisation pairing is off, or a graphics setting is too high for the layer.
Fix: Try D3DMetal with ESync first: Elden Ring crashes at launch without both. Then lower the preset. Left 4 Dead 2 crashes on load at High, and Phasmophobia’s recurring hard freeze clears with TAA anti-aliasing off.

A fatal error naming a missing Windows runtime

Cause: A redistributable did not install cleanly into the bottle, or does not persist.
Fix: Reinstall it into that bottle from CrossOver’s install menu. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 needs its Visual C++ runtime reinstalled on every launch.

Performance starts fine, then collapses

Cause: Memory. Older CrossOver releases hit a ceiling on 16 GB Macs.
Fix: Update CrossOver. Hogwarts Legacy fell under 1 fps on a 16 GB base M4 through CrossOver 25 and holds 55 fps on CrossOver 26. Where the leak is in the game, restarting is the only fix, as Counter-Strike 2 needs roughly hourly.

A launcher opens blank, or never finishes signing in

Cause: The launcher’s own sign-in, not the game. The most common non-graphics failure we record.
Fix: Sign in from inside the bottle rather than a browser, as It Takes Two needs for the EA App. If the launcher itself is broken, run the game binary directly, which is the only way Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord starts. Xbox Live sign-in is a dead end with no workaround on record, in Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Sea of Thieves alike.

Proximity voice chat is silent

Cause: Another macOS app is holding the microphone, and it fails silently.
Fix: Quit anything else using the microphone before launching. This is Lethal Company’s documented co-op defect.

It worked yesterday and does not today

Cause: Something updated. A CrossOver upgrade can leave a bottle in a bad state, and a game patch can break a working title.
Fix: If CrossOver updated, repair the bottle, which is what BeamNG.drive needed. If the game updated, the wait is for CrossOver to catch up. Diablo IV breaks on Blizzard’s seasonal patches and GTA V Enhanced on Rockstar title updates. Recreating the bottle is a last resort: Monster Hunter Wilds ships Denuvo, which counts a new bottle as a new machine against a five-a-day cap.

Online play is refused, or the game never opens at all

Cause: Kernel-level anti-cheat. No setting fixes this and no backend changes it.
Fix: Nothing, on your side. Single-player often still works: Elden Ring plays offline with summons, invasions and PvP out of reach, and GTA V Enhanced runs story mode while BattlEye blocks GTA Online. Where the anti-cheat runs at startup the game does not open at all, as with VRChat, Dead by Daylight and Apex Legends. Only the developer can change this, and bypassing it risks your account: Destiny 2 bans for it.

If none of those match, check the game’s page here for the configuration we verified, then CodeWeavers’ compatibility database.

More detail

What it costs

CrossOver is paid software with a free, fully functional 14-day trial, after which the Windows applications you installed stop launching. CodeWeavers sells CrossOver+ (twelve months of updates and support) and CrossOver Life (lifetime support). On 8 August 2026 CodeWeavers’ store showed a United States visitor $74.00 and $494.00; the CrossOver+ price is geo-varied, and the same page served $54.00 in South Africa, so check your own region. CodeWeavers’ licensing terms set both the trial length and the licence, which covers one person rather than one machine.

The graphics backends

Games speak Direct3D, Macs speak Metal, and the backend is the layer that converts between them. D3DMetal is Apple’s own, taking Direct3D 11 and 12 to Metal in one hop, and does not cover Direct3D 9 or 10. DXVK covers Direct3D 8 through 11 by way of Vulkan, which macOS lacks, so it adds a second hop through MoltenVK: slower in principle, but often the only route for older Direct3D 9 games. DXMT is an open-source Metal layer for Direct3D 10 and 11, bundled since CrossOver 26, and wined3d is Wine’s fallback.

Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is a developer tool, not a way to play games. D3DMetal came out of it, and CodeWeavers says the toolkit is itself built on CrossOver source code.

Rosetta 2 is being retired, and CrossOver is moving off it

Running a Windows game on an Apple Silicon Mac needs two translations, and CrossOver performs only one of them. It converts Windows and Direct3D calls to macOS and Metal. Converting x86-64 instructions to ARM64 has until now been Rosetta 2. Apple states Rosetta remains through macOS 27, and that from macOS 28 it covers only certain older, unmaintained Intel-framework games, a carve-out that excludes Windows games under CrossOver.

CodeWeavers has integrated the FEX emulator to do that translation itself and shipped preview-quality ARM64 Mac builds in July 2026, in which D3DMetal does not work yet, many launchers fail, and existing bottles cannot be converted, with CrossOver 27 expected to resolve it. Trial your game before buying.

What our verdicts mean

WorksOnMac gives each game one of four CrossOver verdicts, and only the first two are ever presented as confirmed. Each is our synthesis of at least two independent public sources, recorded against the CrossOver release it was confirmed on: currently CrossOver 26, based on Wine 11.0, with 26.3.0 the newest point release.

CrossOver · Perfect: Runs as it would on a comparable PC.
CrossOver · Playable: Playable start to finish with a caveat a player would accept.
Runs with issues: Launches, but crashes or performs badly. Promoted nowhere.
Broken: Does not usefully run. Usually anti-cheat, not graphics.

A game with no verdict is not a verdict. Unverified Windows-only games are listed as CrossOver candidates.

Why kernel-level anti-cheat cannot be worked around

Kernel anti-cheat ships a Windows kernel-mode driver, and Wine implements only Windows user-space APIs, so there is nowhere for a .sys driver to load. macOS compounds it: Apple has deprecated kernel extensions and, since Big Sur, no longer loads those using deprecated kernel programming interfaces by default. CodeWeavers, a US company bound by the DMCA, states it cannot legally work around anti-cheat.

The Linux exception does not extend to Macs, and this is the most commonly misunderstood part. Epic states Easy Anti-Cheat covers Linux via Wine or Proton at a developer’s click, and Mac only where a full native Mac build is maintained. CrossOver on macOS is neither. BattlEye is kernel-based and enabled Proton at a developer’s request, with no macOS equivalent, and RICOCHET is PC-only, its kernel driver mandatory. It moves both ways: a patch can add anti-cheat overnight, and CrossOver 26 cleared the barrier that had blocked HELLDIVERS 2.

Tested a game yourself?

WorksOnMac has no accounts and no report submission form, and we would rather say so than show a button that goes nowhere. Post results where the evidence already lives: CodeWeavers’ compatibility database or AppleGamingWiki. A report is usable if it names the CrossOver version, your chip and macOS version, the graphics backend, the store build, and how far you played.

Sources

WorksOnMac is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by CodeWeavers, Inc. CrossOver and CodeWeavers are trademarks of CodeWeavers, Inc. Apple, Mac, macOS, Apple Silicon, Metal and Rosetta are trademarks of Apple Inc. Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Prices and versions change without notice.