Native ARM64 support has arrived in CrossOver Preview, with CodeWeavers announcing the milestone on July 31, and targeting its inclusion in CrossOver 28. The development is less a feature addition and more an act of survival: Apple is discontinuing Rosetta 2 after macOS 27 Golden Gate, and CrossOver has relied on Rosetta to run x86 Windows software on Apple Silicon since 2020.
To replace that dependency, CodeWeavers is building its own version of FEX, an ARM-to-x86 binary translation framework already deployed on Valve’s Steam Deck for running x86 games on ARM Linux hardware. Valve is believed to be actively helping with the development, which makes sense given the shared technical problem both platforms face: translating Windows x86 code to run on ARM processors without a vendor-supplied compatibility layer underneath.
The shift from Rosetta 2 to FEX-based translation is a significant architectural change. Rosetta 2 is Apple’s own x86-to-ARM translator built into macOS, which CrossOver has been riding as an intermediary layer. When Apple removes it, CrossOver can no longer run x86 Windows apps on Apple Silicon unless it can perform that translation itself. FEX does exactly that: it handles x86 instruction translation in userspace, without requiring an OS-level compatibility shim.
Because FEX has already shipped on Steam Deck and proven itself under real gaming workloads, CodeWeavers is starting from a tested foundation rather than writing a new translator from scratch. Porting and tuning it for macOS ARM64 is still non-trivial work, but the baseline credibility is there. The gaming use case is also where CrossOver has grown most visibly in recent years, so the Steam Deck connection reflects where Windows-on-ARM translation effort has been concentrating across the industry.
The stable release of CrossOver is currently at version 26.2.0, which still depends on Rosetta 2. ARM64 support is in preview now and is targeted for CrossOver 28, meaning users running Windows games or legacy apps on Apple Silicon Macs have a path forward, but not an immediate one. Apple has already warned that Rosetta 2 support ends after macOS 27, giving CodeWeavers a defined window to ship ARM64 support before the floor disappears.
The audience most exposed here is broader than just gamers as CrossOver is also used by business and creative professionals who rely on Windows-only utilities, older enterprise software, or niche productivity tools that have never seen a macOS port. For those users, CrossOver is often the only practical alternative to running a full Windows virtual machine. That category of software tends to be less regularly updated than consumer games, meaning many of those apps will remain x86 indefinitely. For anyone on Apple Silicon hardware, a working FEX integration is the difference between those tools continuing to function and having no viable path at all.
For Mac users running Windows software through CrossOver, particularly games that have no native macOS port, this is the development that keeps the whole setup viable past next year. The PowerPC-to-Intel transition saw a wave of software simply stop working when Rosetta 1 was pulled in Mac OS X 10.7; the same pattern was shaping up here, and CodeWeavers is working to prevent a repeat. Whether FEX under macOS ARM64 can match the translation performance that Rosetta 2 delivered (which Apple spent years optimizing at the silicon level) is the open question that compatibility benchmarks from CrossOver 28 will eventually have to answer.
