Wonder how the wow team will handle this?
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Agreed. Curious what this means for WoW on macOS. With the Rosetta 2 Intel emulation, I am assuming things will be “okay” in the short-term, but wonder if Blizzard plans to develop WoW natively for the ARM chips?
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Non-blizz dev, I have friends in game dev and at least in the short term this will likely mute support for mac gaming. I have no idea if they will support Rosetta 2 or just tell players to take it up with apple. I suspect the latter honestly. Gaming on mac was already painful to do dev for… this just just another nail in that coffin.
Blizzard transitioned just fine the last time Apple did this. I don’t foresee them having an issue this round too. With how many iOS developers their are now, this may pay off big for Apple and the companies who can pivot / already developing for iOS. Example, if you’re running a new Mac with an ARM processor, iOS apps will work natively. Can’t wait to see the specs of the high end SoCs in a couple of years for the Pro systems. Imagine playing WoW, Overwatch etc on your iPad.
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I have a hunch that the iOS developers are going to eat this us too. Plus apple SoCs are a beast now.
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When Apple switched to Intel back in 2005-2006, some Mac apps (including games) didn’t make the jump. I would expect it to be the same this time; there will be some apps that just don’t make enough money for the developers to be worth investing the necessary time & effort into porting them over to ARM.
I’m not worried about Blizzard games. I do worry a bit about the Mac games that are using some kind of emulation layer like WINE. But then, some of those games are already lagging behind due to Apple dropping 32 bit support.
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I’m really of two opinions on this matter.
On one hand, I want to stick it to Blizzard (probably unfairly) and say, “Time see how serious you are about Mac support and prepare to rebuild all current games for the new architecture.”
On the other hand entirely, part of me sympathizes with Blizzard and wants to stick it to Apple and say, “The day my Blizzard games stop working natively on Mac is the day I’m done with Apple.”
Of course, these are polarized views. The reality is that Blizzard will very likely continue to support their games (excluding Overwatch) on Intel-based Macs, and then as the transition continues, will probably compile most of their current games to the new architecture.
I’m hoping Blizzard is making a gaming engine that is scalable that can be deployed on various platforms at once like Fortnite. Imagine Overwatch on AppleTV, iPad, macOS, iPhone, Android etc. Hoping this move by Apple helps them along.
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It will be interesting to see where Blizz will be with WoW for macOS a year from now: Universal binary, staying with Intel only, or just abandoning the Mac.
And I wonder if the graphics support on board the Apple Silicon SoCs will be sufficient to run WoW on anything other than the smallest MacBook.
Based on what they showed during the State of the Union, I think these Apple SoC’s are going to pack quite a punch and be pretty impressive for performance (even if under Rosetta 2 for the interim).
Very excited for the future.
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For the overwhelming majority of properly architected apps, the transition will be quick and low-cost. Any devs not making the leap are either cheap/lazy or have niche apps that require features specific to x86 CPUs. Both groups should be pretty small, especially the latter. Very few apps have any good reason to be heavily dependent on any particular CPU arch.
Something interesting is that Apple is now making Metal developer tools available for Windows, which suggests that they want to get more developers of graphically demanding apps (games and otherwise) on board. Metal is very similar to Vulkan and DX12, so if the need for Macs to develop for Apple stuff is reduced, there shouldn’t be much of a barrier to entry left.
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It’ll definitely be interesting to see where this goes. It’s almost certainly going to be piecemeal on Blizzard’s part though since not all of their Mac games use Metal (Diablo 3 being the main one, but all of their Classic games use OpenGL as well). With the Apple ARMs being Metal-only for sure, that raises the real possibility that tha vast majority of games will not come over to the new platform as their developers are unlikely to incur the costs of the transition for little to no return on investment.
And a lot of us have a huge game library on platforms such as Steam or GOG that aren’t 64-bit and are already unplayable on Catalina or later. Abandoning all that for Apple’s vision of the future isn’t appealing in the least and a lot of developers know this as well.
And while ARM can and does work with industry standards such as PCI Express, USB, and DMA, Apple has shown a propensity to lean toward proprietary to the point of making it feel worse using their stuff legitimately than via some other means (e.g. hackintosh). Think of it as the manufacturer version of DRM, etc.
I guess we’ll see in a year or two won’t we?
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Strangely enough, both OpenGL and OpenCL made it to ARM (although still depreciated).
Yeah I think Apple is going to be forced to keep dragging around that old clunker of an OpenGL implementation until CAD programs, etc get with the program and use something more modern (even if that’s just Vulkan/DX12 with a Metal translation layer, which would likely still perform better than OpenGL).
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Yeah, Blender is a big one. There was a slide that showed Apple will be contributing to its development. If cycles makes it to metal, that’ll be one of the last big holdouts.
On the Android side it’s still going strong as OpenGL ES, but on the iOS side, Apple doesn’t really support it anymore. It’s there, but barely there. The whole thing is a mess frankly, so this transition may actually be worse than the one to Intel in the end, not because of the CPU side, but the GPU side.
One thing is a safe bet though: Apple’s going to lose short term sales in the same manner Sony is losing PS4 sales to holdouts that are prepping for the PS5 launch. Apple can weather that no problem, but it’s going to be a lurch, that’s for sure.
Yeah, but this is the macOS OpenGL 4.1 framework, not the ES one.
It’s probably running on top of metal (like ES is on iOS since the A11).
Might the built-in Linux VM make WINE app support better, rather than worse?
I am old enough to remember ever Mac chip transition and its not the end of the world but its not fun.
The problem with this one though, is if developer drops MacOS support, I can just fire up bootcamp and still play now. That will be gone.
Catalina lost win, playonmac and other variations of easy emulation with great performance.
I love Apple but to me it thinks Apple Arcadr or iPad games are on the same level as a game like WoW or FFXIV.
I remember the transitions being pretty darn smooth, but I imagine it depends a lot of the software you relied upon.