Blizzard's Upcoming Game 'Overwatch' Won't Be Coming to OS X

[Monkeydude]

No decent game ever comes to MacOS (at least not in the same century it was first released on other platforms), so I don't understand the outcry. Most Apple users simply don't have the hardware. In the mobile sector only the more expensive MBP 15 comes with a (mediocre) discrete graphics card and also the 21,5 iMac does not have one at all. The iMac 27 has a discrete GU with 2GB Vram which is also not sufficient for high end games any more (on my Notebook I have 8GB Vram -GFX 980m).
So let's face it: Mac is not for gaming.

 

[bladerunner2000]

Dear Blizzard,

.

Hilarious how everyone in this thread has you rekt over this ignorant contribution to the thread.

Apple's garbage hardware was never going to support games... please redirect your anger towards apple pathetic hardware choices.

 

[darenyoong]

Sad to hear this news.

 

[Bermy]

Apple are blameless here. They have baked amazing technologies into OS X El Capitan that blow Windows out of the water. It's up to developers to take advantage of all the power and capabilities of the world's most advanced operating system. It appears Blizzard are not capable of getting the job done.

You are obviously not a developer as well as most replying to this thread. Blizzard has ZERO of the blame here. Apple is 100% to blame. Apples NVIDEA drivers in OS 10.11 are nearly 2 years behind Windows versions. Apple is still way behind their OpenGL routines by 2 versions! You have NO CLUE AT ALL what you are talking about. Apple couldn't give a crap about graphic systems at this time and it shows big time and that is why no major game developers can port their products or keep up on the Mac platform even if they wanted to. FFS have you even ever bothered to go check out what version of NIVIDEA drivers are current for Windows compared to MacOS? Thankfully NVIDEA has been updating MacOS drivers for some Mac systems totally independently of Apple and you can even go download them and install them and get 1000 times better performance than the crap nearly 2 year **** drivers provided by Apple in the OS 10.11.1. Dont believe me? Go here and look for yourself: http://us.download.nvidia.com/Mac/Quadro_Certified/346.03.03f02/WebDriver-346.03.03f02.pkg

Why do posts on Blizzards site like this even exist if Apple is so awesome at video drivers? http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/18300616773

As a gamer I cant even barely run World of Warcraft any longer on a modern Mac. Im lucky to get 15 fps in most areas. Ive had to resort to boot camp and running my game off Windows 8.1 where I can get 100 times better graphic performance and options than I can running in Mac OS. Mac OS is total **** for graphics and apparently Apple couldnt give a crap about it because developers have been telling them for years to get their act together. Ive developed for Macs and Ive owned more Macs since 1985 than you probably can count up to. They haven't "baked" anything but their brains. Devs would be more than happy to take advantage of modern APIs and graphic device driver calls if they existed in OS X AT ALL!

 

[odin]

No decent game ever comes to MacOS (at least not in the same century it was first released on other platforms), so I don't understand the outcry. Most Apple users simply don't have the hardware. In the mobile sector only the more expensive MBP 15 comes with a (mediocre) discrete graphics card and also the 21,5 iMac does not have one at all. The iMac 27 has a discrete GU with 2GB Vram which is also not sufficient for high end games any more (on my Notebook I have 8GB Vram -GFX 980m).
So let's face it: Mac is not for gaming.

This is simply not true of Blizzard for many years at this point. All of their games for over a decade have come out for Mac on the same day, and most often in the same box, as the PC versions.

 

[John Mcgregor]

Sounds like ******** excuse to me.

 

[Winni]

Anybody who's serious about gaming on their Mac probably has a Windows installation anyway.

Anybody who's serious about gaming doesn't use a Mac for it.

 

[NightFox]

Apple are blameless here. They have baked amazing technologies into OS X El Capitan that blow Windows out of the water. It's up to developers to take advantage of all the power and capabilities of the world's most advanced operating system. It appears Blizzard are not capable of getting the job done.

Doesn't matter how good the OS is if the hardware isn't up to the job

 

[John Mcgregor]

Doesn't matter how good the OS is if the hardware isn't up to the job

Im with Apple since 2006 and i was always able to run games that were available at the time. It may not be possible to get highest settings , but more often its about gameplay than about graphics.

Im playing Diablo 3 right now with medium settings and 1680 resolution. It runs just fine. I play Bioschok and Bioschok 2, it runs just fine on medium settings.

I have a retina MBP with Intel Iris.

 

[Bermy]

Anybody who's serious about gaming doesn't use a Mac for it.

Sadly this is about the only honest post on this entire thread and the reason, again, is due to the fact that Apple does not and has not for years updated their graphic drivers to be modern for the hardware they are running on. The graphic drivers in OS X are years out of date compared to the rest of the industry. So in short, yes if you are serious about gaming then you do not game on a Mac because the drivers just simply do not support the OpenGL calls or even NVIDEA API routines that exist today. Take any game and check out your graphic options on MacOS and then put your same game on Windows on your same Mac using boot camp and you will be AMAZED at the options available to you and the performance you will get. That IS NOT A HARDWARE ISSUE. ITS A GRAPHICS DRIVERS ISSUE. At least NVIDEA is currently updating their drivers for Mac OS independently of Apples garbage drivers included with OS 10.11.1. So you can actually go to NVIDEA's site and download CURRENT MacOS drivers unlike the 2 year old ones provided in 10.11.1. For those of you with Macs using RADEON cards...well you are screwed because Apples RADEON drivers are also (surprise!) way old! And the very bad news is that unlike NVIDEA Radeon is not and will not be writing newer drivers for your system. So in a word, those of you who have purchased Macs with Radeon cards are currently (and well into the future) totally screwed.

Doesn't matter how good the OS is if the hardware isn't up to the job

again, you could not be more wrong. Its NOT the hardware. Its the drivers. Apple provides nearly 2 year old drivers in OS 10.11.1. And Apples support of OpenGL is versions behind the industry. They simply do not care about their driver development. Run any game in OS X then run in in boot camp on the same Mac using Windows with the same hardware and you will easily get 2x the performance and a load more graphic options.

 

[Bermy]

Im with Apple since 2006 and i was always able to run games that were available at the time. It may not be possible to get highest settings , but more often its about gameplay than about graphics.

Im playing Diablo 3 right now with medium settings and 1680 resolution. It runs just fine. I play Bioschok and Bioschok 2, it runs just fine on medium settings.

I have a retina MBP with Intel Iris.

Thats another part of the problem right there. Apples "retina" displays. They seriously need 2x more than then 2mb cards they are running in order to get any kind of decent fps out of a game in maximum resolution. (and not even to mention where the heck they get off thinking they can offer mobile graphic cards in high end desktop systems to drive retina displays??????? thats a whole other issue/argument for another time) In order to play WoW, D3, Heroes of the Storm etc you have to half your video resolution and live with blurry fuzzy screen effects just to get a decent frames per second count. Running with vsync off just is not an option on Macs since you will get excessive screen tearing. (most windows systems as well). So in order to get any kind of decent fps on a "retina" display you have to either have a graphics card with twice as much video memory that is currently offered by Apple or half your display resolution and live with blurry fuzzy screen graphics. Im telling you Apple is far behind the game when it comes to video drivers and graphics systems it isn't even funny. I have no idea what their problem is. Im a huge lover of all things Apple for a long time but they seriously need to step it up in this department and they need to it FAST. The fault lines in this area of theirs is seriously starting to break the rest of their foundation and they seem to be completely oblivious to the fact living in a dream world that somehow "metal" is going to replace OpenGL 4 and save them. I got news. It isn't. No devs are going to jump off the OpenGL bandwagon they been on for YEARS now just to suddenly write code in metal which isn't even finished forget comparing features that even exist in metal and do in OpenGL currently and refinement to OpenGL which has been around seemingly a life time now.

 

[Bermy]

Hilarious how everyone in this thread has you rekt over this ignorant contribution to the thread.

Apple's garbage hardware was never going to support games... please redirect your anger towards apple pathetic hardware choices.

hilarious how you post the middle finger (without getting your post removed like I did mine) and blame the hardware when the same exact hardware and games running under Windows using Bootcamp has twice or better the performance and graphic options of OS X for the exact same game and you think its "garbage hardware"? WRONG. Its the badly out of date drivers that Apple provides.

 

[/dev/toaster]

I feel like Blizzard has really been dropping the ball recently. They were one of the few companies that always had great games for Mac.

Very disappointing and guess I won't be playing the game after all. Their loss.

 

[John Mcgregor]

Metal's feature set is roughly OpenGL 3. Worse than the OpenGL 4 version Apple actually ships.

Metal isn't helping here.

How many games are using opengl to its full extent? Since we don't know anything it's just sad and pathetic whining in the dark alley.

 

[Manderby]

The hardware is not the problem. How to use it efficiently is. And how game development works.

Metal is not available for the C language. Bad decision.
OpenCL is very, very hard. No benefit there.
Fullscreen in ElCap interfers with the implementations up to date. Not good.
Support for two year old system not guaranteed. Bummer.
Timer coalescing. FPS be gone.
Input methods and sound system dedicated. Unreliable.

Everything can be solved. But when you have one integrated solution which does all that without further work, it is clear, what to drop.

 

[abcurrier]

Yeah, kinda hard to fault Blizzard when the only Apple machines that would be able to run it are $2500 iMacs and Mac Pros. Hardly anybody buys the highest-end Apple desktops (relative to the mega-selling 13" MBPs and MBAs)

Anybody who's serious about gaming on their Mac probably has a Windows installation anyway.

Have you even looked up the specs that are currently required/recommended for the Overwatch beta?

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/19592339053

Q. What are the system requirements for the Closed Beta?
See below!

Minimum (targeting 30fps):
>Operating system: Windows® Vista/7/ 8/10 64-bit (latest Service Pack)
>Processor: Intel® Core™ i3 or AMD Phenom™ X3 865
>Video: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460, ATI Radeon™ HD 4850, or Intel® HD Graphics 4400
>Memory: 768 MB VRAM, 4 GB System RAM
>Storage: 7200 RPM with 5 GB available HD space

Recommended (targeting 60fps on Medium settings):
> Operating system: Windows® Vista/7/ 8/10 64-bit (latest Service Pack)
> Processor: Intel® Core™ i5 or AMD Phenom™ II X3, 2.8 GHz
> Video: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660 or ATI Radeon™ HD 7950
> Memory: 2 GB VRAM, 6 GB System RAM
> Storage: 7200 RPM with 5 GB available HD space​

The minimum recommended specs, targeting 30 fps, is Intel HD Graphics 4400. The developers have even told all the mac users who got invited to the beta but who cannot install the game to run Windows on their existing hardware. This idea that the hardware is the obstacle is ridiculous.

NVIDIA is also better supporting drivers on OS X in some cards now as well, since Apple doesn't do it.

They wrote a blog detailing it:

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/08/31/mac-driver/

And here's a link to the download page:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/89538/en-us

 

[JordanNZ]

I'd like to point out that Blizzard is bringing 'metal' and OpenGL 4 to most, if not all of their current games... So the exclusion of this game is an odd one. So I doubt it's a technical reason. Unless Overwatch uses compute and tessellation shaders together... Which I doubt since it's targeting OpenGL 3 hardware as a minimum.

 

[MH01]

Apple are blameless here. They have baked amazing technologies into OS X El Capitan that blow Windows out of the water. It's up to developers to take advantage of all the power and capabilities of the world's most advanced operating system. It appears Blizzard are not capable of getting the job done.

They can't work miracles where the hardware does not exist. In fact when it comes to games its Windows that blows El Capitan out of the water , hence this news is no surprise, along with Apple moving towards intergrated graphics.

 

[H2SO4]

OS X 10.11 has Metal... FYI...

So what. Why should we want or have to use Apple technologies? It’s like that stupid Apple hardware/software that only supports .mp4 files out of the box.
You must make it in our format or we won’t play it!! Pullleeezzz.

 

[cycledance]

So what. Why should we want or have to use Apple technologies? It’s like that stupid Apple hardware/software that only supports .mp4 files out of the box.
You must make it in our format or we won’t play it!! Pullleeezzz.

you think you are really smart huh?
microsoft has directx and wmv.

 

[mr.bee]

Blizzard develops its games to appeal to a large audience, as you can see on the posted min requirements every new Mac can support this game.
The hardware isn't the problem, and I guess the software isn't either.

I think it's a (strategical) business decision. Maybe it's Sony and Ms paying a bucket load not to port this game to OS X.

 

[MH01]

Blizzard develops its games to appeal to a large audience, as you can see on the posted min requirements every new Mac can support this game.
The hardware isn't the problem, and I guess the software isn't either.

I think it's a (strategical) business decision. Maybe it's Sony and Ms paying a bucket load not to port this game to OS X.

If you launch a game and it performs badly, you get backlash from your users, the problem is that Apple has very poor driver support.

And example

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/18300616773

Go to any forums that currently support games on a Mac, and the same topic pop up, really poor performance on the mac version using the identical hardware. Apple has to improve its drivers / software, not once or twice a year but on a regular basis every few months to keep up withe the windows experience.

So strategically as a business decision why bother with the mac version, to upset your user base, cause they will blame the company that develops the game. And when it comes to FPS games like first person shooters, you cannot have poor frame rates.

 

[Quu]

1. Apple's OpenGL is outdated
2. Their Graphics Drivers are often outdated
3. Metal doesn't yet offer all the features OpenGL 4.1 has
4. You need to spend £1999 just to get a Laptop from Apple with a Dedicated GPU
5. Only three systems sold by Apple offer Dedicated GPU's the 27" iMac, Mac Pro and 15" Retina MacBook Pro

I'm not surprised Blizzard won't support Macs with their latest game.

 

[pwhitehead]

If they're not going to release overwatch for OSX, then people using battle.net application on macs shouldn't be teased with the overwatch app inside of it. They should remove overwatch from the battle.net app for OSX users. I'm pretty bummed about this!

 

[Swampthing]

Hilarious how everyone in this thread has you rekt over this ignorant contribution to the thread.

Apple's garbage hardware was never going to support games... please redirect your anger towards apple pathetic hardware choices.

I never understand all the energy put forth by people who join forums for things they hate and sit there in front of the computer in their little chair posting negative comments all day long.