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Urgent request from community, War Thunder test.

PracticalMac

PracticalMac

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jan 22, 2009
2,857
5,244
Houston, TX
War Thunder is upgrading its graphics engine, and will be completely using Apples "Metal" API, abandoning this OpenGL 3 API it has used since the beginning (in 2012).

There is a major effort right now to test this before the next version of WT (2.0.0.8) is released and Mac users using OpenGL will loose that ability.

To do this the minimum OS is now Catalina 10.15. Only 10.15 and 10.16 11.0 will acceptable for game (and test), so hardware spec will also increase as Catalina is limited to Mac's made in 2014 and later.

New specs are
Minimum:
  • OS: Catalina 10.15 and newer TBD?
  • Processor: TBD
  • Memory: 4 GB
  • Video Card: TBD (The minimum supported resolution for the game is 720p)
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Hard Drive: 15 GB
Recommended:
  • OS: Catalina 10.15 and newer
  • Processor: Core i7 (Intel Xeon is not supported)
  • Memory: 16 GB
  • Video Card: Radeon Vega II or higher
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Hard Drive: 30 GB

If do run 10.15 and 10.16 11.0, please install the current game (invitation offer bonus to new player), make sure you are running Metal (selected in the Launcher file), and see if everything works well.
If not, please post a report in one of the existing reports, or a new one.
You can also post here, but need the CLOG file located in the WT folder.

Thank you very much!

UPDATE: the minimum specs will be evaluated after the new version is out, ver 2.0.0.8

UPDATE 2: Now that Big Sur 11.0 is out, need testing with that to see if WT works. Reports of random freeze and stutters.
 
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Sorry but those a ridiculous CPU requirements. Why is a core i7 required?? That's got to be the only Mac game not playable on the Mac Pro (xeon) or latest core i5 iMacs.
That's even more ridiculous when you consider that the Windows version only requires a dual core. Does the Mac version run under emulation or what?

They also recommend a Vega II, which is Mac Pro card, and say that a xeon is not supported. :oops:
 
PracticalMac said:
  • Processor: Core i7 (Intel Xeon is not supported)
Click to expand...

jeanlain said:
Why is a core i7 required??
Click to expand...

That was always one of the requirements for War Thunder and is the one reason why I never played it.

From reading through older post, it looks like it was a limitation introduced by lazy programmers who didn't consider the Mac Pro.

I would have thought that it would have been corrected in this update but it looks like the game update is only the graphics.

Note: Here is a good post explaining the issues. The game engine was written in 2001 and it wasn't designed to support multiple CPU cores over a certain size.

i9 CPUs also are not supported (same issues as XEON).
 
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jeanlain said:
Sorry but those a ridiculous CPU requirements. Why is a core i7 required?? That's got to be the only Mac game not playable on the Mac Pro (xeon) or latest core i5 iMacs.

They also recommend a Vega II, which is Mac Pro card, and say that a xeon is not supported. :oops:
Click to expand...

Plutonius said:
That was always one of the requirements for War Thunder and is the one reason why I never played it.

i9 CPUs also are not supported (same issues as XEON).
Click to expand...

Lets see what Gaijin will say about this.

BTW, WT will run on Xeon, just not as good.
 
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PracticalMac said:
No. It was always an option, but now going only Metal
Click to expand...
Not really. While the option was still in the UI, the Metal renderer hasn't been functional for quite a while (a year? two?), after Gaijin tried to make it work without issues and performantly without success for months. You could tell which renderer the game actually used when switching to windowed mode: it said either "Metal" or "OpenGL" in the title bar.
 
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Janichsan said:
Not really. While the option was still in the UI, the Metal renderer hasn't been functional for quite a while (a year? two?), after Gaijin tried to make it work without issues and performantly without success for months. You could tell which renderer the game actually used when switching to windowed mode: it said either "Metal" or "OpenGL" in the title bar.
Click to expand...
I said it was available, not better/stable.
And it was introduced in 2017 (and did poorly early on).

Well, now Gaijin is determined.
 
I confirm what @Janichsan said. Metal support was not available for some time (a year at least). Selecting the option did nothing. The game was still using openGL.
 
PracticalMac said:
I said it was available, not better/stable.
And it was introduced in 2017 (and did poorly early on).

Well, now Gaijin is determined.
Click to expand...
Yeah, sorry, I guess I wasn't fully clear in my post: what I meant is (as @jeanlain already mentioned), that the Metal renderer wasn't working at all until not too long ago. The option in the launcher was purely cosmetic.
 
Janichsan said:
Not really. While the option was still in the UI, the Metal renderer hasn't been functional for quite a while (a year? two?), after Gaijin tried to make it work without issues and performantly without success for months. You could tell which renderer the game actually used when switching to windowed mode: it said either "Metal" or "OpenGL" in the title bar.
Click to expand...

Understood.

@Plutonius and all.

I received word from developers, they will be reviewing performance requirements once the new version is out. Basically there is TBD caveats.
Honestly I think they have a small staff doing core programing and do a lot of, lets say shortcuts expedient work to get a version out. Bugs sometimes take years to get fixed. :(
 
PracticalMac said:
Understood.

@Plutonius and all.

I received word from developers, they will be reviewing performance requirements once the new version is out. Basically there is TBD caveats.
Honestly I think they have a small staff doing core programing and do a lot of, lets say shortcuts expedient work to get a version out. Bugs sometimes take years to get fixed. :(
Click to expand...

Thank you for asking them.
 
Finally had test on my iMac, got this message.

ATI Radeon does not support Metal.png


Hers is older than this list:

Support for Metal on Mac, iPad, and iPhone - Apple Support

Metal is the technology that powers hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple platforms.
support.apple.com support.apple.com

Possible any of those Macs could run WT 2.0
 
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