OS X How stable is Starcraft II on Apple Silicon?

[tomstone74]

Hello,

going soon to our seniors (50+ age ) yearly LAN party where we exclusively play Starcraft II. I always had my biggish Windows PC with me, but this time, I thought I'm gonna go and take my smallish 14" MBP M1 Pro 10/16/32G/2TB with me, as I have read that SC II should kinda work quite nicely on Apple Silicon via Rosetta 2?

Any folks here who have played SC II on Apple Silicon for a prolonged time over multiple hours without (stability) issues? Kinda tempting, to go with a much smaller footprint (luggage wise) this time.

Thanks!

 

[Jumpinbeans]

I have been playing it on my Mac mini (m1) for a couple of years and no real issues at all.

 

[Rnd-chars]

I’ve had no issues for a few hours on my M1 Max MacBook Pro unplugged. If I max out all of the settings, the fans will kick in (as expected), but I haven’t had any issues at all.

That said, I mostly play the AI and missions so if there are bugs in the networking stack I wouldn’t likely encounter them.

 

[holmesf]

There’s no issues from what I’ve seen. On M1 Pro chip the game plays just about as well as on my Intel MacBook Pro 2019.

 

[tomstone74]

Thanks everyone for the reply!

 

[Massimo1926]

On a Mac Mini with M4, I am able to get the following settings and the game is very smooth:

Display Mode: Windowed (Fullscreen) [important!]
Resolution: 3440 x 1440 - couldn’t get to this just on Fullscreen, had to choose Windowed (Fullscreen)
Terrain: High
Texture Quality: High
Models: High
Movies: High
Unit Portraits: 3D
everything else: Medium

This is as good as the Rosetta 2 overhead gets - shades and shadows are the real bottleneck in processing so go easy on those if you are running on an older processor. Waiting for Blizzard to refactor this game for Apple silicon, at which point the overhead will be gone and setting everything to Ultra should work.

 

[holmesf]

Waiting for Blizzard to refactor this game for Apple silicon, at which point the overhead will be gone and setting everything to Ultra should work.

The game debuted in 2010. It's won't be refactored for Apple Silicon unless Apple removes Rosetta and Blizzard / Microsoft execs decide the free-to-play model is raking in enough revenue to justify saving their revenue stream.