World of Warcraft ends M1 support

[penguinlust]

Earlier this year Blizzard changed the minimum system requirements for World of Warcraft Midnight on Mac OS to "M2 or Intel® Core™ Coffee Lake (9th Generation)", leaving M1 machines out in the cold. And they mean it -- WoW on M1 machines will crash in certain more recent zones due to graphics bugs that neither Apple nor Blizzard seem to want to fix. It's been this way since at least March 2026.

You can still run the game on maximum graphical settings on some Intel machines, albeit at only 60 fps. But that's far better than lower settings with hard crashes on M1. So does anyone have any insight as to what the issue might be? My guess is this problem is showing up in other games/applications.

 

[Pressure]

Not really, new games like Neverness to Everness using UE5 runs fine on the M1.

 

[Mac_fan75]

Really? From what i've read is Blizzard only does the necessary for the Mac build, not a minute into enhancing the mac client... So I guess they don't care and don't want to spend any second on it unfortunately.
It's not that better on Windows, engine is so old. I ditched my M4 Max because dual monitor 5k & 4K was giving lag in the game, only disconnecting the Studio made the game fluent again, seriously annoying. Now on a 5080 (ofc not a fair comparison) with gsync etc is mindblowing fast, but still huge fps spikes everywhere.

 

[DankeBrutus]

Only M1 and not even M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra?

I guess it could be the graphics architecture? Maybe a memory issue? How much memory do you have on your M1 Mac? I haven't touched Midnight yet so I haven't experienced any issues.

 

[BigMcGuire]

As a WoW Classic Anniversary player, this worries me. I'm on an M1 Max. I think the Blizzard client has been giving me warnings about it not being a supported app much longer - but that might be different than the thread's graphics settings.

While WoW has been pretty stable, Starcraft runs like crap on Mac and always has (even back in the intel days). But I do run WoW Classic Anniversary at a lower graphics setting. Never had crashes on my M1 Max - tho some of the instances in Outlands made me hear my CPU fans for the first time in years, lol.

 

[Plutonius]

As a WoW Classic Anniversary player, this worries me. I'm on an M1 Max. I think the Blizzard client has been giving me warnings about it not being a supported app much longer - but that might be different than the thread's graphics settings.

The warning is for the battle net app that launches WoW. It uses rosetta 2 to run and will not work after Apple stops supporting Rosetta 2 in MacOS (2 years ?).

The WoW code itself was updated awhile back to run natively on m series Macs.

Compared to updating the actual WoW app, Blizzard updating the battle net app is probably trivial. It's just not that high of a priority at this time.

I would be curious how much memory these m1 Macs, which are having WoW issues, have.

 

[penguinlust]

Only M1 and not even M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra?

I guess it could be the graphics architecture? Maybe a memory issue? How much memory do you have on your M1 Mac? I haven't touched Midnight yet so I haven't experienced any issues.

I'm on an M1 Max 16'' MacBook Pro with 64 GB memory. RAM is not the issue. Plays just fine on a 2019 Mac Pro.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

In a normal video game development studio, when there's a bug in a driver, the game developer will reach out to the GPU manufacturer or the OS developer - Windows, in most cases - and get the bug addressed. This can take months, which is why there's sometimes a driver update when the game releases, or a minimum driver version required.

When developing for Apple though, the workflow is a little different: The game developer identifies a bug, and asks Apple for help. Apple may or may not respond. They may close the ticket without fixing it. They may fix it without addressing the ticket. It may take a point update, or an entire OS upgrade before it gets fixed. The developer may be notified of the fix, or never be notified of the fix. Therefore, it's on the developer to work around bugs using OS specific hacks, and they can be hard to implement well, or make the codebase buggy.

In short, Apple does everything to ensure that game developers don't want to develop on their platform, and in turn developers don't develop for their platform.

 

[DankeBrutus]

They may close the ticket without fixing it. They may fix it without addressing the ticket.

Off topic but this reminded me of a similar situation we've recently had at work. I identified a bug in MS Bookings, sent it up the chain, the bug was submitted to Microsoft, then Microsoft said, in essence, "ya that is a bug, but we won't do anything about it" and they closed the ticket.