Any truth to this

[Tavlina-stormrage]

I saw this in a thread on the Beta forum. Is there any truth to this?

@Heitea-wyrmrest-accord

WoW Mac client is not an ARM application. It wont run on an ARM Mac that doesn’t have the x86 emulation layer. Just because you can’t see the x86 emulator on an M1 as a distinct app, don’t mean it isn’t there. M1 is exactly a big beefy ipad. If you look at the layout under a microscope, it’s virtually identical to the ipad SOC. It’s just beefed up to run at 1.5v instead of 900mV. There’s no x86 hardware on the chip, they do it entirely with a software translation layer. Dig into the nuts and bolts of it and have to actually work with it if you really want to have some fun.

[Angzt-cairne]

The Battle.net launcher is still running as a x86 app, but the game itself is coded for Arm. Not sure when or if they will do anything about the launcher.

The chip architecture to my knowledge is not as simple as that. Though I would let someone with more knowledge chime in on that part.

[Rommax-1333 (Rommax)]

@Tavlina-stormrage

Is there any truth to this?

No, World of Warcraft.app ships with a true arm64 native executable. If you use the command line tool lipo and point it at the WoW app bundle like:

lipo -info /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/_retail_/World\ of\ Warcraft.app/Contents/MacOS/World\ of\ Warcraft

you get the an output of

Architectures in the fat file: /Applications/World of Warcraft/_retail_/World of Warcraft.app/Contents/MacOS/World of Warcraft are: x86_64 arm64

Which is saying there are 2 executables embedded in that file. When you launch World of Warcraft.app, macOS picks whether it executes the arm64 or x86_64 executable based on what hardware you’re running on. If you really wanted to, you could use lipo to delete the x86_64 version of the game and it’d still run fine on an arm64 machine.

There are other things that do run under emulation, like the Battle.net launcher, in-game web browser (for viewing support articles in the help menu), in game voice chat, and crash reporting, which all run as secondary processes to the main game. They are not ported to arm64 currently for various technical reasons.

As far as I know, it’d expect WoW to run fine without Rosetta 2 installed, though I haven’t tried. If it does happen to not run without it, it’d have to be related somehow to the in game voice chat or web browser child processes.

[Tavlina-stormrage]

You learn something new every day.
Thanks

[Tiapriestess-whisperwind (Tiapriestess)]

@Tavlina-stormrage

You learn something new every day.

Part of the problem people have is the perception that because one part isn’t native (the Battle.net app, and in this case, on-demand child processes within WoW itself), the entire thing isn’t native. People think that because installing the Battle.net app forced Rosetta to be installed that the game also requires it. Though even I didn’t know that separate processes weren’t ARM64 native yet. I can only assume it’s a fork of Chromium that doesn’t natively support ARM64, thus it’s an old fork indeed. Any modern browser fork will compile natively on ARM64 unless it requires a deprecated version of webkit AFAIK.

Such is the joy of trying to keep a game with many facets working across multiple OSes on two different platforms (and that’s not factoring in Windows!)

And I really wish I had the expertise to port recent linux nVidia drivers and control software to macOS. Would love being on a modern macOS with my 4090.

[Paladauren-borean-tundra]

@Rommax-1333

WoW to run fine without Rosetta 2 installed

WoW may technically run, but without Bnet you can’t even install it, and Bnet is still Intel. It’s been four years, it should really be updated by now.