I still am having zero problems running D3 under Mac OS X 10.15.1, as previously stated for the latest you need to just give the application full access to the system in prefs for the mouse pointer to work.
Both the CPU and GPU configurations of Macs are quite decent now with 2019 models if you want something more then just a business computer used by a lot of artistic personalities.
Blizzard had been graciously supporting several of their games on the Mac platform for years and it would be very nice if they continue this with D4.
@Felinae
As far as I know Warcraft 3 Remastered is supposed to come out for MacOS, just look at the system requirements for the game on the official Blizzard site.
I know that defragmentation shouldnât be used on SSDâs, so I guess the command Apple has added is intended for HDDâs. About DiskWarriorâs upcoming APFS support â maybe they will add something that helps the performance degradation youâre talking about? Who knows. It just sounds strange to me that this flaw exists in APFS that requires a format and re-install of things to get up to speed â doesnât sound much like how a modern file system should behave.
@Felinae:
I feel ya. The need to have Linux 64-bit client and Mac client at release. If they can make room to support console players then Linux and Mac need to be a priority for the release. They have money and time to make this happen.
Please Please Please. Allow us the opportunity to get off the Windows boat, but still get to play. I donât buy consoles and I already have a more powerful PC. Iâm a PC gamer and Linux is a real Windows contender. Save the hate for political campaigns. Its time to get the widest PC gaming audience included in D4.
It behaves like this because Apple didnât care enough to optimize it for performance. They figured that with the majority using NAND based media now that it would just hide itself by leaning on said mediaâs super fast and equal seek times regardless of where data lies. Problem is, once you reach a high queue depth, performance can drop dramatically, especially on lower end models with less (or no) DRAM cache to buffer writes. The fact it can bring an NVMe drive down to nearly plain olâ SATA speeds is just ridiculous.
APFS has great features, but IMO still isnât ready for prime time and certainly isnât good for gaming or realtime A/V work.
As for DiskWarrior solving that problem - it canât. APFS itself throws the metadata used for enumeration wherever it pleases. No regard to contiguity and the fact that new b-tree nodes are added when a file is appended to or changed means it will never function as optimally as HFS+ in terms of speed. Itâs like a more broken version of CASC in Blizzardâs games. And when both CASC fragmentation and APFS fragmentation are in play at the same time, all bets are off for performance.
Neither Linux nor OS X are the widest gaming audience by any stretch of the imagination Iâm afraid. Windows still holds that title, and by a massive margin. Linux is an afterthought, but you can blame that on the linux developers for not making that OS more mainstream and user friendly. While itâs a massive improvement from the early days of KDE and Gnome, it still isnât a user friendly OS to install and certainly not to maintain. Some distros are better than others, but none match the ease of Windows or OS X for general use (donât get me started on that one missing dependency breaking multiple parts of the OS, which still happens).
If it was built to run on MACs why is it there was never a MAC version ever released and a whole ton of players where banned because they were playing Diablo through a PC emulator ?
Iâve got 10.12.6 and 10.13.6 installed. I primarily use 10.12.6 because I need the built in FTP server that Apple removed in 10.13, but will boot to 10.13 for very specific things when necessary.
The situation with APFS is the same regardless of the OS version right now Iâm afraid. Even in 10.15.1 it still does the exact same things with metadata and b-tree nodes. Iâm hoping for Blizzardâs players that 10.15.1 fixes the issues theyâre having installing both the Battle.net app and the games themselves. If it does, then that should be the go-to OS for those that want optimal performance.
Iâm not going to go for 10.15.anything until I have my new rig up and running since Iâll have to start fresh on setting that up with Clover or OpenCore anyway. Apple really does need to stop doing this yearly update and abandon cycle theyâve got going though. Itâs painfully obvious their software reliability and the sheer number of issues that keep going unfixed for too long are the result of such short development cycles. They need to use a solid foundation and then just build on it like Windows 10 has. Add features when theyâre ready for prime time instead of using their customers as beta testers.
Apple isnât doing any of us any favors by convoluting things and keeping such a short dev cycle. Blizzard learned the hard way that they canât maintain a yearly expansion cycle for WoW. Why Apple still hasnât learned that lesson even after the massive failure of 10.15 so far is beyond me.
This problem will never get resolved until gaming industry adopts a cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) API like Vulcan or anything else and release games with it instead of Microsoftâs aging old DirectX API.
The Microsoftâs capitulation of gaming by using DirectX API is terrible and i cant believe how come they continue to do so since Windows 95 days!
DX12 is very good. The bigger problem is that the GPU manufacturers havenât fully capitalized on the tech yet (this goes double for nVidia, which is behind in DX12 performance relative to where it should or could be). Itâll get better in time. Itâd help if Microsoft would return exclusive fullscreen mode to games using DX12, if for no other reason than to let disabled players play without issues, but to also give better performance than we currently have.
But the real problem isnât platform specific APIs. Those are designed specifically to optimize performance on the respective platform. Itâs that there is politics in play between the companies. Apple and nVidia are two prime examples. Apple wants full control over nVidiaâs drivers so they can exclude anything they donât want users to be able to use (e.g. nVidiaâs Pascal and Turing GPUs in the Mac Pro 4,1 and Mac Pro 5,1 computers). nVidia refuses to relinquish control, especially since they know their hardware best and donât want Apple doing what they do with AMD drivers, which is âOK, it works, just ship it already!â
And so gamers as a whole lose out despite there being competition. Not because of the competition, but because of politics. Thereâs a really good chance those politics wipes out hope of getting D4 on the Mac side, let alone Overwatch 2, and by proxy Overwatch 1 since you really need 1 to lead into 2, especially if you want 1âs cosmetics.
I wouldnât expect the industry to settle on one API though. That actually dilutes competition and in many cases, innovation as a result. The APIs are fine. Itâs the companies that need to get with the program.
And Blizzard is very likely not to wait out their petty squabbles either. nVidia is a premiere partner with Blizzard. After all, Blizzardâs intending on making use of RTX (ray tracing) functionality in World of Warcraft 9.0, the next expansion. But with Apple fighting against nVidia for control, time may well run out and thatâs that. Apple is even going so far as to introduce AMD specific functions into Metal that nVidia GPUs canât use. Thereâs a real possibility that Blizzard gets tired of being caught in the middle and is ultimately forced to drop Mac support because of Appleâs insistence on total control. Blizzard already got burned once when Overwatch was being developed. Iâd wager they arenât keen on repeating that mistake.
So if Apple doesnât start actually taking gaming (and nVidia) seriously, I wouldnât really hold my breath on getting a Mac client for future games outside of WoW. And Iâm sure Blizzardâs tired of getting constant feedback from angry Mac players that their games are performing poorly when Blizzard isnât at fault. They can only do so much with the hardware Apple puts out.
I may be a fan of OS X, but Iâm not blind to Appleâs foolishness and anti-competitive ways. Thatâs why I build hackintoshes. I prefer OS X, but will have a fallback for true gaming if Apple fails to deliver.
I said âwidest PC gaming audience included in D4â. You misread my words. Iâm talking about inclusion, and by that I mean the Windows, Linux, Mac gaming audience and then add the entirety of the console gaming audience.
Please donât play the blame game. Windows is mainstream and the go to OS because of multiple factors. Its not a Linux developer issue when there is way more options on the Linux side. So if we are going to spread the blame around then:
1 - OEM laziness in their OS offerings
2 - device manufacturers and software developers laziness and fear thus going with the path of least resistance
3 - end-user laziness, ignorance, fear, and disinterest
4 - the foolish and self-destructive behavior of some in the Linux community
Dell, HP, Compaq, IBM all pushed Windows with their products for more than a decade because they were not interested in innovation or offering alternatives. It was and has always been âall about the moneyâ.
Device manufacturers and software developers have followed the path of least resistance and developed drivers and apps. strictly for Windows, and sometimes Windows and Mac. Many of them have actively opposed anything other than those two options. Since 2000 companies have slowly adopted support for Linux and/or worked with the kernel developers. They also fear untold rising support costs, Linux development costs, IP theft, and giving copy-cats an opportunity to compete against them. All of this is born of fear and laziness. Acti-Blizz is just one of the companies in this category.
Part of the justification used is âlack of market shareâ. Linux does not follow the Windows market share and licensing model. There are no licenses to track unless we are talking about enterprise Linux offerings and we arenât talking about that here. There is no way to accurate determine the number of Linux desktop PCâs in use. Even Steamâs data collection is only going to sample a fraction of the real number of Linux desktop PC installs. You canât use web statistics either since there is a plethora of ways on Linux (and the other platforms) to hide browser and OS info. Many Linux users employ these tools to make their installation look like a Windows install since Windows malware will not work on Linux. Dual booting and running Linux from a USB key are two more ways in which Linux desktop numbers are skewed.
The lack of license count is closer to the root justification propping up the âlack of market shareâ argument. I cannot say for sure if the Blizzard âAgent.exeâ can detect WINE, Lutris, PlayOnLinux, or Steamâs Proton. I have my doubts since the point of the compatibility layer is to be indistinguishable from a real windows install. If they are indistinguishable then we are further skewing the number of real windows gaming environments from Linux compatibility layer injected environments.
Many end-users are ignorant of what version of Windows (or Mac) that they are running. Many of them have no idea what Linux is, or does, how much it costs, or how it works. I donât hold the ignorance of the masses against them. The ignorance is compounded by misinformation and laziness which leads to fear and/or disinterest. Fear and disinterest in alternatives, and fear of a learning curve.
Some elitist and clown types have scared off and disrespected new comers. This hurts desktop Linux adoption and drives people away. Thankfully the number of bad actors is small and the vast majority of the Linux community is quite chill.
The idea of convenience is highly subjective.
The above is straight up false information. User friendly installation and maintenance is readily available. There are many distros that are setup to cater to newer users and those with a lower skill level. As for gamers it would be simpler to have them see an honest video of this for themselves:
Its less than 15 mins.
Mainstream and gaming ease of use:
watch Netflix or Amazon Prime videos in a browser
user a word processor or spread sheet (via a native Linux app. or in a browser)
access yahoo mail, G-mail, Hotmail or other e-mail source in a browser
browse the web in a browser
watch DVDs and Blu-ray movies
listen to music and pod-casts in MP3/ MP4 format
access Adobe PDF files
Play a Steam game or non-Steam game
move data between smart phone and PC
print a document
use voice-comm. apps. like Discord
All of the above are Ez Pz on Linux for the vast majority of mainstream and gaming end-users. Unless we are talking about Adobe media content creation or the use of some non-mainstream apps., Linux has caught up to Windows. What tends to scare/confuse new users is the sheer number of options in each app./activity category.
Obviously we donât have true parity between Windows and Linux. The lack of parity mostly comes from the software developers and device manufacturers aka lack of software ports to Linux. If I could get my Blizzard games on Linux natively there would be little reason to run Windows. My steam games are already native Linux games. Even though Linux and Windows run on the same exact hardware, Blizz could just treat Linux like yet another console platform, with the exception being that the hardware is the same as the Windows platform.
Your point of view is of the 1990âs Linux. I would agree with you if you were attempting to compile the OS from scratch. I run Manjaro and I game on Manjaro. I also use Linux Mint. Both are very user friendly and have UIâs similar to Windows and Mac. At some point Iâm going to try out Pop-OS. Iâm not concerned about dependencies because I do very little tinkering. I use the system much the same way a Windows user uses their system.
Tias you gotta to catch up. You on DX12 and need to catch up to Vulkan. If you have a recent nVidia video card and up to date drivers then you have Vulkan on your system. If you are running and AMD card you have Vulkan. Take a look at the video and come back.
If Linux were that mainstream itâd be a lot more widespread by now. It isnât helping that there are too many distros out there and not just one or two primary distros that people can latch onto. It suffers from fragmentation just like Android and iOS do between the various versions.
Itâs better than it used to be, but it is still by no means user friendly. And remember, for most linux gaming, you still have to deal with some sort of wrapper, such as WINE. The vast majority of users are either not inclined to learn and deal with the necessary steps to make most games work, or are just not savvy enough to do so, with a lot of them being in between those two extremes.
Itâs easy for someone with technical expertise to claim itâs âeasyâ. It isnât. And on the Mac side, Apple appears to be gearing up the process of locking down operating systems with its T2 security chip. Linux users are finding that particular setup quite problematic as linux generally needs low level access to the system, which the T2 chip obsfuscates (sensor data is impossible to get on those systems outside of what Apple allows thanks to that chip).
No, it isnât the manual everything nightmare from back in the Yellow Dog Linux days (that was fun BTW, getting it to work on a PPC 604/200 Mac), but it still isnât where it needs to be yet. Right now, the only reason for me to run linux would either be learning experiences and/or if I had a pfSense router (basically a computer running linux and acting as a router). Of course, for the price of a higher end pfSense router w/ SFP+ and 8 GbE ports, I could just get a 72 core Mikrotik router with four 10GbE SFP+ ports and a managed switch and Iâd have 10Gb/sec network speed for NAS <-> computers.
Ez Pz for those that know what to do, the guy came out with a lot of you have to jump through a few hoops , and to be fair the majority of people would not be interested in having to muck around and jump through hoops or even having to get wrappers to get them to run
They want to be able to install the game and play NOT install the game and do a dozen other things on top of that to get it to run
I linked the video to illustrate that we are well beyond the 1990s Linux. Even the compatibility layer software is becoming more robust. There are hoops with non-native games. Native games donât have that requirement.
Linux isnât coming from a wealthy corporation that hires Jeff Goldblum to do commercials that air during the superbowl. Everyone knows and expects Sony to run ads for the PS-5. Game publishers have Sony to thank for doing the heavy lifting of promoting the platform, thus cultivating a market. This is why corporate funded products like Windows, PS-5, and Xbox are considered mainstream.
Valve/Steam, and to a lesser extent GoG, have already done the work of promoting Linux gaming. So, if Blizz made native 64-bit Linux game clients there is no need for compatibility layers and wrappers. Steam already has native Linux games.
Blizz would need to build native versions of the launcher and game clients (same as Steam). Next, they can work with the more popular newbie friendly and gaming focused distros to get the launcher into the repositories. Once the launcher is installed via a few clicks, the Linux gamer is at the same install point as the windows gamer.
Blizz could alternatively partner with Valve and companies like Feral Interactive to get native versions of their. The partnership would be similar to the one between Blizz and the Chinese developer that works on the Chinese version of D3 and Immortal.
With native games, launching and playing, on Linux, Windows and Mac, would be nearly identical (no hoops).
We can buy powerful Linux based PCs and Laptops. System 76, Dell, and HP will sell pre-built PCs with Linux pre-installed. There are other vendors but 3 come to mind.
Please check out the author/developer of Carbon Copy Cloner blog entitled âAn analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drivesâ, this is someone that very familiar with how it works as well as speed. See
Steam is a platform for publishers to make games. Steam itself isnât making linux clients, the developers would be. Valve doesnât actively do anything other than promote that a game is linux compatible via its OS icon in the listings. The only reason theyâre actually compatible in many cases is because the game is available on SteamOS, which is a variant of linux, but pared down for the STBs that Steam is on.
Making a native linux version is more work than you give credit for. Iâm actually surprised ConcernedApe did so with Stardew Valley, but I guess they figured it was similar enough to OS Xâs BSD underpinings that it would be less effort. It does require in most cases though that the developer use Vulkan or OpenGL (or both) as their APIs, since DirectX is not native in linux. Blizzard ended OpenGL support permanently not too long ago on all platforms outside consoles, but the console developers handle that.
Bare in mind that making a linux client also means supporting yet another platform. Thatâs likely been the biggest roadblock given linux is still a niche OS no matter how you slice it. Even OS X has a larger footprint than linux.
Yes, they do sell them with linux preinstalled. You can get Raspberry Pi setups with linux preinstalled too. But that doesnât make it mainstream in the consumer space in the least. Linux is still primarily sold to enterprise customers with those prebuilt systems.
Most people want point, click, play. In most cases linux still does not offer that. Itâd be a whole lot easier to get behind from a user perspective if there were a dedicated distro that the majority of users were on instead of fractured all over the place, each with their own repositories and dependencies. Until that gets resolved, linux will remain resigned to being an enterprise solution and hobbyist OS in the consumer space. Outside of that, its primary use is educational to learn skills with.
I already did. Thatâs part of how I know how APFS works. It still spills metadata everywhere regardless of media, meaning youâre driving up the queue depth significantly on NAND media, which slows them down significantly, especially when coupled with 4k block reads/writes.
The issues with platter based drives has been known for much longer than that article has been up. Itâs why Apple didnât make APFS mandatory for regular hard drives for so long. You take APFS vs. HFS+ and HFS+ is going to beat the snot out of APFS every single time for performance. APFS only wins with the features Apple brought over from ZFS.
You are mixing bits and pieces of facts and non-facts. Valve does make native Linux games. Here is one example:
~Artifact on Steam
(the above example is a hi-rez, 64-bit native Linux game, and direct competitor to Hearthstone)
Its a Linux game because it is a native Linux executable there is no compatibility layer or wrappers involved. Steam, the windows app., is a game launcher (with other features) which serves the same purpose as the Blizzard launcher. Steam has a native 64-bit Linux version of its launcher. It looks the same and works the same as the windows version. You can launch native Linux games from the Linux version of the launcher.
Native Linux Executable = no compatibility layer or wrapper software.
What do you mean?
Making native games on the various modern OS platforms requires the same kinds of work and relative amounts of work. You write code and compile the code. The time and effort requirements only differ by days to weeks and Iâm not suggesting that Windows is the shorter path. Blizzard obviously has more experience on Windows, but then again they have more experience on Windows compared to the yet to be release PS-5.
OpenGL and Vulkan (the successor to OpenGL) are open standards. DirectX has always been a proprietary API coming from Microsoft. Since Vulkan is an open standard API, using it leads to greater portability. Vulkan matches and in many cases exceeds the performance of DX12.
More fear and misinformation. Supporting yet another platform isnât a show stopper or stumbling block. Nobody cries foul just because they have to support the PS-4 platform, when they fully intend to make a PS-4 game. Your niche argument was squashed in my prior post, where I explain that there isnât an accurate way to determine the usage count of Linux desktops. All of the arguments fall flat because all of the referenced methods are akin to using a flash light in the dark to accurately determine the size of the planet. Its just absurd.
Mute statement ^^. Raspberry Pi isnât desktop Linux and isnât a gaming hardware or software platform. With respect to Blizzard porting any or their games to Linux, letâs keep the discussion to Linux running on AMD/Intel 64-bit CPUs with AMD/Intel/nVidia based graphics subsystems. This is what Windows 10 runs on for gaming. Mainstream is a subjective term. If you are attempting to juxapose âmainstreamâ and ânicheâ they both fall flat as arguments. One is subjective and the other is inaccurate.
Native Linux Steam games are point, click, play. What a Steam user does on Windows is the same thing on Linux. Linux native games on Linux are the equivalent of native Windows games on Windows. There are no hoops to jump through. Compatibility layer software such as WINE/Proton bridge the access gap, in varying degrees, to Windows games on Linux. If there were native Linux ports of the games then there would be no need for WINE/Proton.
What Iâm requesting is a native 64-bit Linux Diablo 4 game developed and released in tandem with the Windows, Mac, and console versions of the game. This is to bring the widest and most inclusive audience together around for D4.
There is absolutely no need to homogenize the Linux platform. My Linux native Steam games run without extra steps on both Manjaro and Linux Mint. I donât run Ubuntu, but I would expect that the games would behave the same on that distro since SteamOS and Ubuntu are Debian variants.
If Blizzard wanted to limit their distro. focus they could start with these:
Arch/Manjaro (and a few other Arch variants)
Ubuntu (and some of it flavors such as LinuxMint)
Debian
SuSE (maybe)
Fedora (maybe)
I would skip Gentoo/Slackware/Mandrake (and their variants) for official support, and any of the specialty distros (ex: KNOPPIX). Here is the beauty of Linux⌠Blizz doesnât have to use my list as the determining factor. Blizz can engage the Linux community to help determine the distros. they should target first, any follow up targets, and distros. to avoid.
One of the pillars of Linux is diversity and choice. This is why Linux runs on everything from super computers, PCs, gaming consoles, smart phones, enterprise servers, to enterprise and consumer grade routers, and so much more. There is nothing to resolve with respect to your statement.
Imagine gaming on a Mac. Or owning one at all, for that matter. Dell is probably the worst of the worst, but at the end of the day, it still has Windows. LUL
So does any Mac computer as well. For non-techies, Boot Camp makes that possible. For techies like myself, we do an install from a UEFI GPT formatted USB stick and then just apply the latest Boot Camp drivers for Appleâs keyboard/mouse products (if necessary). Itâs essentially native Windows minus all of the hardware sensors on any Mac using a T2 security chip.
