Hey all,
I recently switched to using my games on an Apple Mac Mini M4 after years on Windows. I’ve always had a Mac in some capacity, but never used one for gaming. As I get older, gaming isn’t quite as central for me as it used to be and with Windows 11 restrictions, I dumped my PC as upgrading seems pointless, but I still enjoy playing StarCraft II and WoW Classic occasionally, especially co-op with my son, which should run on Macs with no issues.
That said, I’ve run into some performance issues I can’t quite figure out.
In StarCraft II co-op games, I occasionally experience sudden FPS drops down to 12fps, even when there’s not much happening on-screen. Then, after a few minutes, it jumps back up to over 100 FPS. This happens even at the start of a match. I’m playing at 1440p on medium/low settings, and I’ve checked Activity Monitor and nothing unusual seems to be running in the background. For the most part, the game runs smoothly, but these random dips are jarring and I’m not sure what’s triggering them.
Has anyone else experienced this kind of behavior on the M4 Mac Mini, or have any tips for troubleshooting it?
Also, separately, does anyone have a link to an official statement from Blizzard about ending Mac support? I keep hearing people mention it, but all I can find is forum speculation and not an official post or article.
Thanks in advance!
Pretty much all support for sc2 is gone, not just for mac. The game has been out of development since 2019. The only thing blizzard does now is fix game breaking bugs. The balance patchs ( atleast the last 3) have been done by the community and not blizzard.
As for the lag spikes, thats probably from internet issues, and unrelated to your mac, even tho i will say macs are terrible for gaming. Also these lag spikes may not even be from yours as if your teammate has bad internet that will also trigger them.
i suspect the issue to be related to your network. a solution would be to get a USB network adapter, so that you can run a wired connection. your modem should have ethernet ports. i have had issues because of slow net myself.
Those hardware restrictions can be bypassed. My system had everything needed except the processor. With some research, I installed windows 11 no problem.
It hasn’t. Mac is still listed as a supported OS in the store.
Support isn’t gone, just development. Those are separate things. Blizzard support will still (try to) assist people with technical issues for both os’s. An os like linux is what would be called unsupported.
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The fact that Blizzard made an Apple Silicon version of Diablo III of all games gave me some hope they might release an Apple Silicon version of StarCraft 2. Talk about a dead game, Diablo III most likely has way fewer players than any other game Blizzard currently supports. Would be really nice to get an Apple Silicon version. StarCraft games are more or less the only PC games I play regularly these days, and while I’m getting by with the Intel version, macOS 26 starts the end of the line for x86 and Rosetta 2. I would love to make sure I can keep playing in the future.
And while lots of games run great in Crossover, SC2 is not one of them. As bad as the Mac version runs on Apple Silicon, the Windows version is, perplexingly, much much worse. I’m assuming my Mac Studio M4 Max should play SC2 on max settings at 1080p at a minimum, but the CPU-focused effects hold it back. I can get decent performance if I set anything that says it “relies on the CPU” to low settings and everything else to the max. The game is so old I expected that it’d run totally maxed out on this new machine that can play much more graphically intense native games perfectly (like Control and Death Stranding, for instance). So far, I’ve been wrong.
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I was reading about the Rosetta issue. I hope they port it for Mac Silicon soon, I wont be going back to a Windows PC these M4 Minis are un-believable.
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