Your computer is too old to run HotS. Specifically your graphic processor is below the minimum requirements of “NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 640 or AMD Radeon™ R9 M290X or better - Metal capable GPU”.
The Radeon R9 M290X (Neptune XT) was released in 2014 so likely all macs made before then are too old to run HotS.
If the other people in this topic have approximately equally old systems then they also have the same problem that their GPU is below the minimum requirements. However I cannot confirm this as you were the only person to post what mac model you are using.
Since it ran fine before Tuesday’s patch, what amazing graphics features were added to make my hardware no longer sufficient to run the game? And, if there were some graphics features added to enhance the video, why can’t they be toggled off or reduced as others are to allow older workstations to run the game?
The entire game was moved from using OpenGL which is deprecated on modern Apple products to using Metal. Some optimizations for Metal may require the use of a feature level beyond what your hardware supports.
Because that would mean maintaining 2 graphic APIs. One “legacy” and one current. This quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare, especially when it comes to adding new features which the old standard of OpenGL supported might not support well. There is a reason most emulator developers are dropping OpenGL support for MacOS builds and instead improving their Vulkan API plugin to run via MoltenVK (Vulkan on Metal).
That said it may be that Blizzard was not aware of how many legacy MacOS users they had. I would suggest posting the Mac model as well as GPU and asking that they lower the GPU requirements.
I’m having the same issue 2011 iMac 10.13.6
Radeon 6970 2048 MB
I’ve been playing blizzard games since WC1 and Heroes has been my favorite game for over 2 years now, so to have my computer suddenly become unsupported for a game already out for years seems ludicrous to me. Please fix this Blizzard!
Same issue for my 2011 Macbook Pro with AMD Radeon HD 6490M. I have been playing the game since release on it and this is crap it is no longer supported.
Blizzard really messed up here, but I hope they have a solution for this as they are about to lose a lot of their loyal Heroes of the Storm gamers // fans.
Unfortunately, I don’t think they care anymore. In fact, it’s probably part of the plan. Make the system requirements only available to a smaller portion of Mac users who have the latest machines. They rid themselves of the Mac community slowly but assuredly. They’ve already shut out Mac users from Overwatch. So this is them transitioning to Windows- and console-only development. It’s really hard for me, so I’m considering just switching to Windows when I build my PC instead of making it a Hackintosh. I fear the larger gaming companies are going to drift away from Apple again and offer no support in the future. I was concerned when Metal originally came out, because I knew it would likely cause gaming developers to run the other way or have to embrace it while losing support for everything legacy. I feel like Blizzard should just be honest at this point and just drop Mac development in general. It breaks my heart, but it’s clearly where they are headed.
I think Apple is partly to blame for this by not supporting standard graphics APIs. It is pretty much Metal or bust with them at the moment and back when Overwatch was in production Vulkan and MoltenVK did not really exist.
You forgot phone as well…
This is not true. The Classic development team is putting a lot of effort into Warcraft III Reforged to make sure MacOS is supported. That said it may suffer similar problems to HotS further down the road since it will have to use Metal, but that depends on the feature level selected.
Hopefully for any new/future game projects they use Vulkan as the primary graphics API. All major graphic vendors offer drivers with native Vulkan support for Windows and Linux and even many Android phones support it. Sony supports Mantel which formed the foundation of Vulkan and so likely also supports Vulkan in some form. Switch graphics being powered by NVidia also has native Vulkan support although some developers use the API Nvidia provided for Nintendo.
Only the Xbox One and Apple products do not natively support Vulkan. Technically the Xbox One can support it if Microsoft swallowed their pride and let AMD provide driver support for it, since it uses the same chips as the PS4 which almost certainly does in some form. Apple will never support native Vulkan but MoltenVK acts as an adapter between the Vulkan API and Metal which all Apple devices support. Hence a Vulkan backend can be made to run on Mac in a reasonable way.
Many emulator developers are now using MoltenVK to allow their Vulkan API backends to run on Apple devices. Although MoltenVK has limitations it is constantly being developed and so far the results are pretty good and certainly better than OpenGL and easier than writing and maintaining native Metal support.
This is true of Overwatch, but Blizzard have been asked constantly and recently. And they have no intent of porting it to Mac. None. They aren’t even looking at attempting it.
WarCraft 3 Reforged will go the same path. They’ll support metal, which will require 4GB graphics cards or above. That will cut out a lot of their Mac user base. And then they eventually end Mac support.
I’m grateful for Vulkan or MoltenVK for trying to bridge the gap. But that doesn’t fix Apple’s problem or Blizzard’s problem. There’s no communication. Neither seems to care. So I predict Blizzard drops support for Macs in the near future. The Diablo 4 announcement in November will all but confirm my prediction when it will be console- and Windows-only (maybe mobile).
One cannot know that for sure. People might be working on it in the background however without a solid delivery date or with it being an on-off project they would be reluctant to publicly disclose it to avoid disappointing people if it gets delayed or ends up never happening.
I do not think so. They already made a lot of changes to Warcraft III just to keep mac support, including migrating it from PowerPC to x86 and now to x86-64 (64bit) to run on modern MacOS. They even introduced issues to the Windows build for a few patches while they moved sound playback libraries to one that supported Mac.
I think Overwatch may have just been an exception. Considering its troubled origins (part of Project Titan) it is possible Mac support had to be dropped along the way to reach deadlines, or the lack of support was inherited from Titan.
are you fcking advocate for blizzard? why you are constantly defending developers just not thinking about any users or give a sht about reasonable answers. you are just here for licking someone ar*e for no reason.
My comments are made from the perspective of a generic software developer who has some idea of the actual problems and difficulties one faces when developing software.
The issues people are facing with MacOS, outside of the raised hardware requirements, are due to an entirely new graphic backend being written (Metal). Since this is a lot of all new code, that part is effectively beta quality so issues are to be expected. Since the HotS team is not as large as it used to be fixing the issues will take time possibly in the order of many months.
The system requirements being raise is another, unrelated, issue. People need to remain vocal that they were effected by this and that it does not make sense. The same Apple hardware can run HotS via Windows 10 but not via MacOS.
I am really sad too. HoTs was one of my favorite game, and i already switch to Ps4 to play Overwatch… I didn’t expect that. Now we can’t play anymore and we can’t enjoy the game which is to me an error. i was playing with my friend just for fun, and maybe now, i can think about LoL. Bad end for Macos players.
