Apple Silicon (M4)

Mac Technical Support
1

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!

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

Hey Leviathon,
2 things:
#1 Windows 11 can be fully customized. I have done so myself and now it looks and functions exactly like Windows 10 even with the start button on the bottom left, quick launch icons, then all opened tabs and on the far right all normal running icons. I can even right click on the desktop to get the classic menu and I blocked all ads too. The thing that blows me away is Windows 11 fully supporting my Alienware OLED 240hz monitor’s HDR mode in all modern & classic games and plain old desktop apps too! Starcraft II at 240hz in full Dolby HDR at 4k resolution and all details maxed is incredible! In Windows 10, the HDR was wonky and it never looked so bright, clear and colorful. Ive never seen colors so amazing!

#2. Your Mac problem.
Apple decided to dump Intel chips to increase their own profits, not to make the world’s fastest anything. They are using low-power mobile parts for everything including hard drive, CPU, motherboard and GPU. Soldering and gluing everything together. While this makes for a great device to watch movies and doom-scroll tic-tock, it is a terrible idea for hard core gaming beyond Minecraft/Angry Birds/Resident Evil (games with very few things happening simultaneously).

The reason why Apple M chips are a terrible design for hard core gaming is multi-faceted. The Apple M chips share RAM, Video RAM, CPU and GPU all in 1 pool. That’s a big problem because if the GPU wants to do something, it has to sit around till the CPU is done (micro lag spikes). Also, Apple uses low power Laptop RAM (LPDDR, Low Power Double Data Rate) RAM is designed for energy efficiency in portable devices, offering excellent power savings but at the cost of performance and flexibility. Key drawbacks versus standard desktop RAM (DIMM) include permanently soldered modules preventing upgrades, higher latency, generally lower bandwidth.

So imagine you are playing Starcraft II on a Mac M5 Max, the current most powerful Apple computer… You will get a nice speed burst roughly around 150FPS but then out of nowhere the FPS will drop like a rock down to 12 FPS. This will happen every 5 to 15 seconds the entire time you play. This is the CPU/GPU and LPDDR RAM fighting for control causing ridiculous and constant lag spikes. Some are micro-lag spikes that cause an entire game to feel choppy and other spikes are harder that break gameplay.

The biggest joke of this is that the last Intel Mac from 2019 with an actual discrete GPU, the AMD Radeon Pro W6900X, can game just fine like a Windows PC! No micro-lag stutter, no lag spikes, just nice and smooth framerates! Its not the most powerful GPU and has roughly the performance of an Nvidia RTX 3080 minus the raytracing cores, but miles and miles above and beyond even the most powerful M5 Max/Pro/Ultra for all gaming and 3D rendering.

For reference, both my laptop with an RTX 4080 and my desktop with an RTX 4090 can get Starcraft II up to the maximum framerate of 512 FPS at 4k, all settings Ultra maxed and 240hz refresh rate while playing 4v4 ranked vs humans. Framerates will drop to around 180fps when you have 4 to 8 max armies hitting each other, but no micro lag stutter and no lag spikes. The desktop obviously handles these epic battles better than the laptop. Having a separate GPU with its own dedicated VRAM is why PC gaming will always be better than Apple M chip gaming.

My suggestion for you, sell your Apple computer. Use the money to buy a used gaming PC or a cheap new one at Micro Center or Costco. Even the weakest, cheapest $500 gaming PC can outperform the fastest Apple M chip in Starcraft and gaming with no lag spikes. Just make sure it has at least 16GB of RAM. Video cards above an RTX 50 series is best (4060, 4070, 5060, 5070 etc).

At Costco right now they have an MSI mid-high range gaming PC with an RTX 5080 and a Ryzen 9 9900X CPU with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVME HD space. The motherboard only has 2 ram slots, but for what you want to do this would be awesome and plenty for your needs. Since its not Apple, you can actually upgrade anything/everything in the future on this machine if you want because nothing is soldered in and nothing is glued together.

If you have to have an Apple, then go on ebay and get any non-M chip, Intel Mac with a discrete GPU.

Youtube has a bunch of videos showing that last Intel Apple computer with a dedicated discrete GPU gaming with zero lag spikes and no micro lag stutter. Just search and you will see.

8

There still out there folks, this dude probably thinks the world is flat too. EA you really should support Apple Silicon. Candidly you really should refresh this game entirely too. This thing could be 10x amazing now with the enhancements in hardware since 2019. You could probably cut the costs a lot using AI to program it too.