Heroes on iPad Pro?

General Discussion
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This only matters from a long term reliability and overclocking point of view. For chips operating at stock performance they will still perform as good as identically.
If a chip is sold as an I9 9900K then it will perform like all other I9 9900K in stock operation. It might be a bad bin so have 0 overclocking headroom and fail in 5 years or a good one which can reach 5.2 GHz and last 15+ years. However both of them will still achieve as good as the exact same framerate in HotS or any game for that matter.

I think you might also be getting confused with yield based product separation. Some standard chip designs are binned during production and separated into different products based on the binning result, with better bins fetching more. This is best seen with the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and AMD Ryzen 7 3800X. Both of these use the same pieces of silicon except that binning is used and all the high end dies end up in the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X while all the low end ones with defects end up in the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X. No AMD Ryzen 7 3700X will perform as well as the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X as a result, despite during manufacture the die having the potential to end up as either before it was binned. However this also proves my argument since as a normal gamer there is no reason to spend more money and buy the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X since the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X performs very close in gaming workloads.

My I7 920 lasted ~10 years. Only reason I am getting a Ryzen 9 3900X as a replacement (and having to use the other system until then) is because a PSU fried either the motherboard or the CPU and it was not worth replacing like for like with something 10 years old.

It is perfectly reasonable to consider supporting 10 year old hardware. Especially if the game has not added anything significant since then that justifies the need for more powerful or modern hardware. This is especially important for keeping target audience large since people in developing countries can only really afford 5-10 year old hardware.

Which is exactly what many modern Mac systems are doing, not hindering you. The new iPad pro would run HotS acceptably, certainly at 30+ FPS I would imagine. The main concern is to make sure that the player is using a keyboard and mouse, as the game was designed for. Playing with a track pad or touch screen will not result in a high skill experience. However maybe match making will cancel this out since it is unlikely they will reach higher skill MMR with such a handicap.

macOS (OSX) is only for x86. IOS is only for phones and then there is their tablet OS. Within the product stack and supported devices the same OS version is used. It is only devices that fall out of support keep using old versions of the operating system, and such devices are usually unsupported by game developers anyway. This is not an argument of if Mac products are value for money, rather that the new ones are capable for running games like HotS, including their flagship tablet and possibly even phone.

The same could be said about Windows 10. Every major release brings new APIs and might change existing ones.

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That’s pretty much what I need. I appreciate the effort, but the rest:

… sounds to me like this:
Τεχνικά θέματα, τεχνικά θέματα, αμοιβή, τεχνολογία, επεξεργαστής, υπολογιστής

Impressive dedication, though.

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I already addressed this issue. as long as they are current generation, the x86 will blow ARM out of the water. Why? because of the instruction set. the x86 can perform complex operations in a single cycle, whereas ARM needs several cycles to do the same operation. This makes the x86 design much more complex, and ARM is simpler, hence the difference in power consumption.

OFC, a 10 core2quad cannot measure against top of the line ARM CPUs. if it did, then i’d be very surprised.

Except in laptops/desktops, you can up the cooling capacity yourself, the ipad pro is literally limited by how hot your environment is. And passive radiation of heat is very inefficient. Air is a very inefficient coolant unless it gets moved around, this is why we have fans in the first place, to move hot air away from the CPU.

Yes.

Because the GT8800 doesn’t support directx11.

No, you really don’t. Modern GPUs (especially AMD - nvidia is kind of meh about it) have dedicated video encode/decode cores which support most popular formats, including h264.

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Both of them operate as good as identically internally since all CISC instructions are translated using microcode to run on the internal RISC engines which all use pipelines, speculative execution and register renaming. This makes x86 inherently slower since the instructions need a longer pipeline to execute, and also more energy intensive to run as a result of the logic for these extra steps.

Very few instructions execute in 1 cycle. In fact I do not know of any x86-64 instructions that do so. They usually have a latency of anywhere from 4 to 90 cycles varying based on processor and even the state involved. This is assuming that some other pipeline stall does not occur such as a cache miss or RAM read, or even functional unit contention in the case of cores with HT/SMT. However modern processors will execute as many as 5 of them per cycle and run them in parallel thanks to pipelining.

ARM even has a performance advantage as the instruction set inherently supports more registers than x86-64 and registers are the fastest type of storage for a value, faster even than the fastest cache.

The only reason that ARM is mostly slower than x86-64 is that to be more power efficient they have to run at lower clock speeds, have less complex pipelines and fewer internal core resources which can cause more contention. However the same likely applies for low power x86-64.

Also be aware that there are different tiers of ARM processors. The lowest tiers of ARM are very slow as they are designed to use sub milliwatt power and be very cheap. The iPad Pro and such use the highest end of ARM which is designed to compete against the big players like Intel, AMD and IBM. In fact Intel is lagging massively behind as they have failed to change their desktop CPU designs for 3 years and it will be at least another 1-2 before they do so. Intel’s flagship I9 9900K and its KS variant are proof of this as they are nothing more than pushing the same tech to the limits and effectively becoming a space heater in the process.

Did you make sure to cap frame rate? Tried 30 FPS?

Any thermal limitations on the Surface would likely be the result of the GPU since SC2/HotS is very GPU power intensive. The GPU and CPU are likely physically near each other and share the same heat sink solution so it is possible the GPU may encourage the CPU to thermal throttle. However the process should be self limiting as throttled CPU will draw fewer frames per second so throttle the GPU. Might also be a power limit on the GPU.

If using integrated graphics then it could well be a power limit as the GPU and CPU may share the same power limit.

Still does not stop it from running HotS…

Updated: 4 weeks ago
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600 GT

It does support D3D11. Just not all features of it. D3D11 is nothing more than a feature extension to D3D10 which the 8800 GT does support. StarCraft II was originally played on cards like the 8800 GT, until it murdered most of them and the cards were replaced by more reasonable modern ones. When Blizzard says D3D11 is required they mean that the driver must state that it is a D3D11 GPU (even if using the D3D10 feature subset) and that it is not a D3D9 card which are no longer supported as they never supported D3D10 to begin with.

AMD’s video encoder is only slightly better than Intel’s and is considered useless for professional streaming due to the low output quality. NVidias new encoder on the RTX and high end GTX cards is considered gold standard for hardware encoders, however it has major technical limitations such as not supporting encoding of composed output such as with overlays or webcam required by some live streamer formats.

Professional live streamers now are using either software encoding, or have dedicated computers to either hardware or software encode a captured display output. The latter is especially the case for console streamers who have to video capture anyway, in their use case NVidia encoder is sufficient but as the PC just has to do encoding a software encoder is also sufficient.

All hardware encoders produce low quality output when it comes to non-realtime encoding such as for YouTube upload encoding. Such encoders will either use CUDA (not the dedicated hardware encoder units) or fall back to CPU which is why the test is important.

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Most of that is Greek to me. Lol. But will the A12X chip, on the iPad, be able to run HotS over 30-45 fps? If it can, then it will run as well as my $700 HP laptop with an AMD FX 9800P processor and the integrated Radeon R7 graphics which I bought in September 2017. 2 years ago. That’s what my laptop runs HotS at. About 40 fps. I’m sure the iPad has AT LEAST that much power.

Cooling, software development, the % of the player base that will actually play on iPad, and other things I can’t think of right now, are speed bumps that may be hard to truly make it possible but I just think it will be cool to see. Really the only people who would benefit from it are younger players who don’t actually have a laptop, which is a really small percentage anyway.

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Now personally, I wouldn’t mind having a tablet version of this game with simplified graphics. Would be nice to play some heroes while laying in the bed, getting some dailies done and I feel a game like this can translate well. For casual play this could be awesome.

On the negative side, PC will be the superior version with a better control scheme, and likely better connection. You (and your allies) would be at a disadvantage playing with the tablet over another team.

I would say a tablet version would either need to only work with other tablet players or limit the play options on a tablet (IE no rank mode but Quick Match and VS AI okay).

Then of course this pretty much being a near dead game means we likely won’t get anything like this added. Hell not sure if even with full support the games design work work well enough with this… game has one of the worse reconnect features I have ever seen.

Regardless of everything, I would be all for this. Just don’t ever expect it to happen.

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dude, they can’t even give us fun brawls like 5 stitches vs 5 stitches anymore. you think they’re gonna reprogram the game for a whole new OS?

2 Likes
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If the forums were only about things Blizzard would actually go through with then most of the posts would be worthless. This is a thread about the thoughts of the community and whether it would be cool or not, not whether Blizzard would do it.

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I own a iPad Pro and I would not play HotS on it. I use it for art.

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I would love to see it on iPad Pro. I‘m also in that ecosystem and have some Windows Laptop for works. But i would love to play it also on my ipad. I think the gab would not be longer in about a year and its in my opinion possible that Blizz gonna do something about it. if the new macbooks and imacs coem with arm, a new os that is based on arm and about the same as the ipad os, yeah maybe we see it come for ipads.
I think the arm based chip would rock the game like nothing.

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Please observe when the last post of this thread was posted before replying to a thread.

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I vote for a Carbot version of Heroes of the Storm without cosmetics and has only stick horse and segway mount that has crossplay with the main client with Ranked disabled for mobile devices

This way people can play the game on their toilet(The Frozen Throne) even without downloading more than fourteen gigabytes

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I want to play hots on my nintendo wii
/s

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I want to play HotS on my Nokia 3310… :thinking: