World of Warcraft is the only game I care about. Whenever somebody gets their hands on a new mac with the M1 chips, can you please advise how WoW runs on it?
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WoW on M1 Chips
- Thread starter Invisible Elf
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The GPU is still only 2.6 TFLOPs I think the slide said, so I wouldn't expect it to set Azeroth on fire.
I am also curious about this and wonder if Blizzard will continue supporting Macs in general.
I played WoW on the PPC Macs and Blizzard made the switch to Intel without issues. Blizzard continued support for WoW on PPC Macs for almost 5 years after the first Intel Macs were launched. It was dropped with the Cataclysm expansion.
It is also worth noting that Blizzard continued supporting WoW on PPC Macs for over a year after Apple stopped updating the SW for PPC Macs.
Based on this, I would say that Blizzard will continue to offer WoW support for Macs.
But...
Blizzard has changed so much in the past ten years.
While the Blizzard of old was one of the only AAA game developers to continuously develop for the Mac since the 90's, I am unsure if that level of commitment to Mac has survived in the post-Activision years.
I have read a while ago that WoW has a surprising number of Mac users compared to other cross-platform games. I assume this has to do with the long-term Mac support that Blizzard has provided, along with the popularity of WoW.
So, WoW on Macs is probably safe for now.
I played WoW on the PPC Macs and Blizzard made the switch to Intel without issues. Blizzard continued support for WoW on PPC Macs for almost 5 years after the first Intel Macs were launched. It was dropped with the Cataclysm expansion.
It is also worth noting that Blizzard continued supporting WoW on PPC Macs for over a year after Apple stopped updating the SW for PPC Macs.
Based on this, I would say that Blizzard will continue to offer WoW support for Macs.
But...
Blizzard has changed so much in the past ten years.
While the Blizzard of old was one of the only AAA game developers to continuously develop for the Mac since the 90's, I am unsure if that level of commitment to Mac has survived in the post-Activision years.
I have read a while ago that WoW has a surprising number of Mac users compared to other cross-platform games. I assume this has to do with the long-term Mac support that Blizzard has provided, along with the popularity of WoW.
So, WoW on Macs is probably safe for now.
I really do not think Blizzard cares about its Mac player base because as soon as a new OS appears which seems
to be pretty frequent these days Blizzard jumps on it pretty quick leaving behind the users who for one reason
or another do not want to or need to jump onto the latest OS, yet they keep supporting Windows 7.
to be pretty frequent these days Blizzard jumps on it pretty quick leaving behind the users who for one reason
or another do not want to or need to jump onto the latest OS, yet they keep supporting Windows 7.
BG 3 at Ultra settings 1080p on M1 in this video at 6:45: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/10859/
Intel UHD Graphics 630 in Mac Mini 2018: 3.150 GPixel/s, 25.20 GTexel/s, FP32 403.2 GFLOPS
M1 Mac Mini 2020: 41 GPixel/s, 82 GTexel/s, FP32 2.6 TFLOPS
A12Z FP32 1.1 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 560X 2.056 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 5300M 3.2 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 5300 4.2 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 580X 5.530 TFLOPS
Intel UHD Graphics 630 in Mac Mini 2018: 3.150 GPixel/s, 25.20 GTexel/s, FP32 403.2 GFLOPS
M1 Mac Mini 2020: 41 GPixel/s, 82 GTexel/s, FP32 2.6 TFLOPS
A12Z FP32 1.1 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 560X 2.056 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 5300M 3.2 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 5300 4.2 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 580X 5.530 TFLOPS
WOW was one of the very first games to get Metal support, so that contradicts what you just said.
Consider looking at it this way: every single iOS developer now has access to the Mac ecosystem.
It's a plus just by sheer numbers. There will be a few gems that translate well from iOS to Mac, and other developers will take notice of the $$.
But I agree with you on some level - I'm not dying to play 99% of current mobile games.
As long as it runs WoW Classic, I'm OK. That's all I ever play anymore.
Same for me on the Mac. It was playable on my previous 2018 Mac Mini at low settings. Whilst the M1 is not a GPU powerhouse, I am pretty sure it will be a degree better than before, what degree I have no idea, will find out soon.
And if it this 1st gen performs reasonably well it suggests even better things for the M1X or M2 whatever it will be called.
Given WoW got has long been supported and got Metal support quite quickly, I don't think Blizzard is going to abandon players, not yet at least.
Although if it could look at Retail WoW and be playable also I would be very happy.
Yup, WoW Classic is where it's at
I've been playing PUBG on my iPad Pro, and it runs really well. That makes me hopeful games like WoW Classic should run fine on a larger body as well.
I know that this is not helpful information, but I find it amusing that this game needs a fairly decent GPU to run well considering it ran fine on a 2006 iMac/MBP base config. 2004 game and doesn't look much better than it did back then, at least to me. I believe WoW classic has the same requirements which is odd to me, isn't it supposed to be the 2004 version?
As for speed, any GPU-intensive games I really can't trust to run well in Rosetta, hopefully Blizzard releases a universal binary for WoW pretty soon.
As for speed, any GPU-intensive games I really can't trust to run well in Rosetta, hopefully Blizzard releases a universal binary for WoW pretty soon.
I first played WoW on my iMac G4, which I am sure was slower than any of the Intel Macs. It was never a game that required high-end HW to run okay, but things are a little different with Classic.
WoW Classic uses the same game engine that Retail uses, which is different than the one used on Vanilla. The current engine is more HW intensive than the older one, and it also requires a Metal-capable GPU is using it in the MacOS, which sucks, as I first thought I would be able to play it on some of my old Macs.
Yup, as mentioned above it, is using the retail engine, totally understand why they did that but it then makes it more resource-hungry than the original from 2004.
Mac Support Update -- November 16
With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta. We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon. While our testing...
eu.forums.blizzard.com
Seems we'll have support, now the major question is performanceMac Support Update -- November 16
With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta. We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon. While our testing...
Can't be any worse than any of my current Macs
I wonder if that includes WoW Classic?Seems we'll have support, now the major question is performanceMac Support Update -- November 16
With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta. We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon. While our testing...
I am curious about what Macs you play WoW on and the specs of them.Can't be any worse than any of my current Macs
I have a pretty old Mac and WoW seems to run pretty well on it. I no longer have the settings up to 11 like I did with Mists of Pandaria, but I wouldn't consider how it runs and the settings as bad.
WoW still works on my Mac Pro 2008 running Catalina with EVGA Nvidia GTX 680 Mac Edition. I think it works with macOS High Sierra and later. The MouSSE kext is required for this old Mac (it's part of the dosdude1 Catalina patcher).
All those in my signature - I have to keep a PC around for games like WoW because none of the Macs are sufficiently powerful for mythic raiding min/maxing.