This is mostly aimed at the developers, though I’m sure I’ll hear from the Apple haters.
I get it, Macs aren’t what you want for serious gaming, but as Blizzard’s games and a very select few others are all I really want want to play on a computer (Mostly play Switch and retro consoles), my iMac is enough. I figure there’s a chance since Starcraft 2 runs fine, and Blizzard does such a great job optimizing for the Mac. Plus it will just look gorgeous on this huge 5k display (even if I have to play at 1080p). Also I don’t plan to upgrade until the regular 27" iMac has 120hz refresh rate, so… hoping for a decent experience.
For those unfamiliar, the specs are:
4.2GHz quad-core 7th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz
64GB 2400MHz DDR4 (upgraded myself of course)
Radeon Pro 580 with 8GB video memory
1TB SSD
So will Reforged run at a respectable fps with at least mid-level graphics settings?
I’m going to say pretty much yes. Provided OSX is still properly supported. Given it’s running on just an enhanced version of the original engine, you should be more than fine.
We don’t know exactly how high it’ll scale up yet. But you should manage mid - highish settings.
Although you won’t get 5k, Apple actually put a lot of care into their screens. So even though you might be restricted to 1080 (more likely 1440 or something like that), you’ll still benefit from a quality monitor.
If it is a desktop of sorts then probably, although one might have to keep down extreme stuff such as anti-aliasing (off).
I do not think 4k or 5k resolutions will get perfect performance, as those are extremely demanding on GPU fill rate. With the upgraded graphic pipeline the fill rate demands for 60 FPS might be beyond what the GPU can produce. This will especially be the case for some custom maps which are a bit too spammy with their model usage or which leak special effect objects.
I’m inclined to agree with both comments. I definitely wouldn’t expect 4k or 5k run well at all, but maybe 1440 at around 40-50fps, and 1080p for hopefully a solid 60fps, with settings in the mid to high area, and a couple of big resource hog settings turned off. Would be awesome to get 1440 running at 60fps so I can take at least some advantage of a high resolution monitor.
Anyway thanks for your thoughts.
Oh, so does anyone know if the original game runs at 1080p natively? Not sure if they updated that when they added widescreen support and whatnot. Wonder if they did anything to the textures…
Yes it does run natively at 16:9 and wider aspect ratios. However pillar boxing is used for UI elements like main menu, loading screens and the placement of the UI (not game view) due to those art assets being made to only support 4:3.
They do not really need to optimize for it since the game is already being optimized for D3D11 and hence any capable graphics system will perform well even if the code ends up fractionally less efficient. That said Apple is not known to be the most performant of systems, hence I would not be surprised if even with a highly optimized Metal backend it would still perform slightly worse than on similar hardware running Windows 10.
Apparently the main area which metal performs badly at is tessellation as the Metal graphic pipeline lacks a dedicated stage for it, instead relying on compute shaders and multiple passes to emulate it. However I do not think reforged will use tessellation (no Blizzard games have?) so this should not be a problem.
He’s not wrong. Playing video games on a laptop is a great way to kill it’s lifespan. You’re farting away cash doing that on a mac. And before you say, ‘But it’s not a mac book!’ those low form factor all-in-one computers are basically a laptop in terms of design and manufacture. They carry all the same design flaws inherent in packing what typically takes a full sized tower and jamming it into about 1/5th the case factor.
Like, if money’s no object, sure. An Apple iMac pro is going to be more than adequate- I would hope a computer that cost north of 2 grand would be able to handle an HD remake of a 15+ year old game- but for the normies that’s a lot of money.
And yeah, you don’t need to convince me that Microsoft is a bunch of bastards. I’m just focusing on the money here.
For the most part I appreciate your comment, pretty fair, although I can’t agree that I’m farting away money by occasionally playing games on my iMac, which I bought for other reasons. (Creating and seeing digital art in 5K being one. You really can’t go back to other displays after iMac.) And just to be clear, I’m talking about the mid-2017, non-Pro iMac. Less crazy in cost, but a lot for many, sure. So yeah, I see your point, it will heat up some, but with some efficiency improvements over last gen, I think the iMac will survive what I put it through.
I brought up the original question because while I am hoping Reforged will run on my computer, I don’t have any intention of buying a decent/good gaming PC if it doesn’t, just to play it and like 3 other non-console games I might be interested in. However, it would still be a disappointment to me to not be able to play Reforged, hence the post reminding devs that there are some Mac users out there itching to play. Know what I mean?
Only if the video game is heavily loading the product. One could play Warcraft III TFT on a modern MacBook and it should barely warm up. In fact one is likely to reach higher temperatures running FireFox with many tabs open than running Warcraft III TFT.
Warcraft III Reforged will obviously be different. Although I doubt CPU usage will go up (good temps on CPU), the GPU usage will obviously be a lot higher (bad temps on GPU) so yeh prolong playing, especially on battery (more sparing with active cooling) will shorten its life.
Not like it really matters for Mac products today seeing how they already have a finite life only slightly longer than the guarantee.
Except unlike a laptop, power management is not a concern. Hence they can use more powerful active cooling solutions which can be set to run at higher speeds persistently.
Frankly towers are excessively sized these days and only required due to the discrete heat management of components. If looking just at CPU and GPU I would go as far as to say that no internal fans are required at all and the computer could be built into a near air tight box the size of the motherboard with GPU as long as a water cooling solution with external active cooled radiator is used. However this probably is not the case as unlike laptops, desktop motherboards likely require some air flow for passive cooling of their chipset components and the used DDR4 memory likely also requires some case air flow for passive cooling (a problem laptops do not suffer from as they use a different type of memory which uses less power).
It easily can, the only question is at what resolution. Some apple products have high resolution displays which can be very taxing to drive at native resolution, even with high end GPUs. There is a reason it is not recommended to game at 4k, let alone 5k…
Oh you can. There are tons of non-apple displays with similar, the same or even better experience. However obviously they are going to cost one apple like prices, there is a reason apples are not cheap! The key is it has to be high density. This means 4k, possibly wide form (5k? these marketing terms get confusing…) with HDR in a size similar to a standard 1080p computer display.
That said these displays are notoriously impractical to play on at native resolution. To drive a 4k display running a modern AAA game at high visual settings and 60 FPS you are looking at cards like dual SLIed RTX 2080 Tis, not something one usually finds in a Mac. Fortunately one can set a resolution for the game that is more manageable for the GPU, and it should up scale reasonably well.