I used to play SC on windows back in the day, and I’ve played most of SC2 initial campaign on an intel Mac a few years ago.
I recently switched to a Macbook Pro M3 Max with 128gb Ram. (with CPU/GPU maxed out upgrades).
I installed SC2 fresh on this machine this week, and I assumed given it’s the top M3 processor with 128GB ram and the top GPU/CPU apple offers, that I would be able to run SC2 on the absolute max settings, and still get a good performance.
I setup everything setting to Ultra/Extreme, and I was running it at 2880x1620 resolution.
while playing a Kerrigan campaign mission, I was getting around 25 FPS.
my hypothesis here is that Apple Silicon will never shine until the game is adapted to Metal/Apple Silicon. (going over rosetta is clearly killing performance here)
Given how blizzard is supporting this game still, any ideas why that is not happening?
you likely just need to get it to run only on the p cores. the e cores is less effective. it should be possible to turn off the e cores, though i do not know enough about the apple cpu to know how and i have not used mac os for very long.
from what I understand from Mac, there is ZERO ways for an user to do that.
and why would the OS use Efficiency cored for a Game? If it did, I assume it’s a major flaw in Mac OS.
right?
it is not a flaw in the operating system. it is a flaw in starcraft 2. it was never built for that kind of arcitecture. the same problem is on pc, as that too uses p cores and e cores. though only on newer intel cpus(12th gen and newer).
They just updated Diablo III to have an Apple Silicon version, so I’m hopeful SC2 is coming. It may not be the dominant eSport any more but it still has a reasonably large community compared to a lot of other games (especially Diablo III, I didn’t know anybody but me still played it these days) and deserves for Microsoft to support it.
It runs horribly in Crossover, so the Windows version is not an option, and on my new M4 Pro it actually crashes all the time. So it’s time for an update from Blizzard/MS.