It’s not a loaded question; it’s just sarcasm. You only think it’s a loaded question because you’re confusing it with a leading question.
What I am clearly asking you is at what point do you think Apple’s all-or-nothing transition strategy no longer be an issue?
It will no longer be an issue once those that are currently tied to the platform have moved on and all that are left are those that Apple has tied to the platform that have nothing to lose from the transition. That could happen sooner if Apple can’t deliver to the pros and power users, or if it goes so proprietary that they aren’t worth keeping around anymore.
Unfortunately, for many of us, their transition comes far too soon before there is a workable solution for what we’re losing in exchange. For gamers, especially those with a large existing library and/or those that aren’t interested in yet another subscription, Apple’s transition and the appearance that it’s trying to shoehorn gamers into Apple Arcade means there is precious little left to hang onto. We like OS X, but being tied to it for no gain makes no sense.
Honestly, do you expect Apple to be perfect? Particularly in wha tis for them a very edge case, graphics-intensive MMOs?
I love Apple, too. I just have to be bemused by the combination of world-class graphics hardware (the displays), run-of-the mill graphics controllers, and a lack of commitment to keeping gaming on the Mac.
All of the above aside, my 5K Retina 2017 iMac with a 4-core i7 @ 4,2 GHz and a Radeon Pro 580/8 GByte runs WoW just fine at native hardware resolution. For me, that means (1) terrific dynamic range, (2) incredible contrast, (3) totally acceptable frame rates (45 - 60 fps) for everything but raids, and, finally (thanks Blizz), (4) in 8.x at least, legible NPC and PC name tags.
(3) is fine with me because I don’t even do LFR except when forced to by, say, the War Campaign. (1) and (2) are everything, because my old eyes really do much better and I can play much longer with that kind of display experience.
(4) is simply what anyone should expect bu which gets sacrificed at scaled graphics settings. The hell with them.
Just be aware that your Mac isn’t running the game at native resolution. It is using scaling, and/or you’re using <100% render scale, almost certainly both.
5120 x 2880, 100%.
Just picked up a deeply discounted refurb iMac Pro for home, and although I had already used one at work, the displays on these things really are incredible. Puts everything else in the house short of iPhone/iPad to shame in density, color, contrast, brightness, and backlight bleed. The closest off-the-shelf standalone monitor, the LG Ultrafine 5k, somehow still manages to be worse despite using the same panel. Even if you concede on pixel density and go for 2560x1440 or some ultrawide thing, there’s only a handful of other displays that are in the same league. And then you remember that Apple has been shipping these things since 2014… what are standalone display manufacturers even doing?
If they could just put nice brawny GPUs in these things it’d be seriously difficult for any other setup to compare.
I’ve been playing with render scale on this iMac Pro, and on a Vega 56 with 100% render scale I can get 60 frames in Boralus if I:
It gets the fans a little angry doing that though and frames can drop here and there, so I’ve been running it at 50% render scale, where it can run with fans just above idle, barely audible.
Then you’ve got settings drastically lowered. No Mac can do native 5k at high framerate with max settings. Not even close. That’s why Apple uses Retina scaling and games use render scales these days. A 1080 Ti could handle 4k at decent settings natively, and a 2080 Ti could edge closer to 5k native, but those middle tier (at best) AMD GPUs? Not so much. Perhaps Navi 2 will finally bring at least a semi-decent punch to Macs, if it makes it into the fold.
This issue is close to my heart. I’ve been an Apple fan for about as long as I’ve been a Blizzard fan. I already gave up Overwatch for Macs, but I’m not sure if I can give up WoW for Macs.
The problem with jumping gun is, it alienates porting. Most developers won’t migrate code just for apple. So until MS forces it, it will mean gems like portal and portal 2 will remain 32 bit until such a time that it’s in valves interest to make them 64 bit on windows side.
Apple has muscle in mobile market, but they tend to over step on desktop market where they lack muscle to really try to strong arm developers into falling in line. They’re more likely to lose develoers than to get them to comply with frequent radical changes.
Same stands for arm. Rosetta 2 is smart of them at least, but i can tell you now a lot of devs will still probably end of life products and say “it’s supported until it stops running on rosetta 2”
What do you feel would’ve been the appropriate move, then? No matter how I look at it, tying removal of 32-bit support to Microsoft’s timeline puts them in a hard spot, because it means they would’ve had to do one of the following:
For option #1, the main problem is a lot of extra overhead for the team working on Rosetta. This could’ve easily pushed the beginning of arch transition out another 1-2 OS releases out, and it adds more variables to troubleshoot for developers and users. Could also potentially have a cascade effect, delaying other things like the unified platform effort.
#2 puts Apple at risk of the same thing Microsoft experienced, with macOS-ARM not getting taken seriously by third party devs and subsequently garnering a reputation as a “toy OS” among users due to lack of native support.
#3 chains Apple to Intel and all of its shortcomings indefinitely, unless they manage to work out some kind of relatively short-lived “bridge contract” with AMD. Like #1, could also potentially have a cascade effect, delaying other things like the unified platform effort.
I think this is probably true no matter what Apple does. As long as they’re making transitions of any kind, they won’t win over devs who expect whatever binary they dumped when development was frozen to work perpetually. The only “winning” move here is to do what Microsoft does with Windows, and I dare say the OS space does not need another Windows.
This probably wouldn’t happen. The 32/64-bit issue is wonky with ARM64 Windows. It can run ARM64 and ARM32 apps, but only x64 apps, not x86 apps. It’s ironic that only 32-bit apps run on ARM64 Windows. Apple would be facing a similar situation, but reversed - only 64-bit x64 apps run, not x32. But in Apple’s case that lies directly in the kernel, not the overarching architecture, since Apple removed 32-bit userspace support from the kernel itself.
Apple will almost certainly remove OpenGL entirely from the OS at the end of the transition period, so this wouldn’t really be a problem. The reason for this is that MoltenVK and Metal require 64-bit apps anyway. It’s expected that 32-bit support is entirely gone for the ARM version of OS X in the future. But keeping it in the Intel version of OS X would at least let games continue to run on those machines until no further Intel OS X development occurs. But it does buy time for users on the fence.
This would never happen. Once Apple commits to something, they go all in. That’s mostly what has kept them alive with their transitions. They follow through, unlike Microsoft with ARM64 Windows where it has languished for years. Perhaps Apple will force their hand and make them get it working as well as x64 Windows. That would give players options at least on the Mac side with Windows games.
I recently read that they actually had 64-bit x86 emulation support in the works, but that’s basically invalidated by another piece of news that came out recently: Microsoft has shifted the focus of Windows 10X to the low-end internet machine space, aka Chromebooks. In other words, it’s Windows RT Mark II, and now probably a dead end. x86 compatibility barely matters when you’re running on the same chips used in entry level smartphones.
Yeah, it’s definitely the best thing about their execution, even if it’s often flawed in others ways.
I wouldn’t call a once per decade rate of changing CPU architecture “radical changes.” More like keeping up with the times.
It’s clearly going to be a pain for some devs, depending on the individual app and whether the amount of work required to port it successfully is justified by revenue — but they do have two years from (sometime before) the end of this year to do that work. The only pressure is likely to come from people who have money morning a hole in their pockets and want to buy the latest, greatest, first ever Apple Silicon-powered Mac and insist their one, true mission critical app be supported natively on it, which sounds like the null set to me.
It’s more then that, you ignore the software level stuff.
There is literally a reason we have far less devs now and the ones we do put in far less effort.
The only reason overwatch isnt on mac, is because apple forced deveopers to switch to metal, BEFORE it had the feature sets needed to replace opengl. This literally killed overwatch. When metal finally added the needed feature 2 years later, blizzard decided against introducing a bunch of new players to an existing player pool for a game that’s focus is entirely multiplayer. There was a bit of spite there too. They couldn’t even use opengl because that had been out of date for years because remember apple worked on metal IN SECRET all while leaving developers wondering why opengl was left stagnant and behind their needs. Developers had TWO apis that were lacking when metal came out. Metal was basically crap from 10.11 to 10.12. it was finally good enough in 10.13.x
Even more developers were lost in way they dropped 32 bit. Apple had a right to drop it but again did so TOO SOON. like with metal, it was a situation where waiting would have been better but like always apple over asserted itself because their biggest marketshare is mobile, so they don’t really care if they piss off desktop devs left and right.
Then of course there are all the issues with buggy drivers, buggy metal and still missing features and the answer is always “well fix it in NEXT macOS a year from now”.
Devs don’t want to wait a year every damn time something is broken, but that’s what apple does.
Even more things, it goes on and on and on but the general thing is apple is really crappy to desktop developers, but great to iOS ones. That’s just the nature of reality. So it’s no surprise the focus of mac going forward really is just going to feel like a much more powerful iOS device but a heck of a lot less PC games.
I will be literally shocked if WoW lasts on macOS 5 more years. Heck, I give it 4 tops. As for Diablo 4, Overwatch 2, or anything else they release, I’d get a windows system ready to go, that ship has sailed.
Rambam, I’m going to make this as clear as possible. The transition to “Apple silicon” is not designed to push iDevice users into the desktop realm, it’s to push us desktop users into the iDevice realm. That’s where Apple’s money base is now, not the Mac.
It is in our interest to keep the Mac as “PC compatible” as possible so we have the widest array of software and games available to us that we want to play and use. It is in Apple’s best interest to force us into their walled garden full of proprietary hardware that continues to take control away from the end user bit by bit and corral us into things like their subscription based Apple Arcade. I don’t know about you, but 90%+ of my game library is 32-bit still, most of which will never see another update to 64-bit even on Intel/AMD (x64) hardware, let alone see a switch to ARM64.
AMD ironically is Apple’s middleman to all of this. Apple will continue to use AMD to prop up its transition on the GPU side until its own GPUs are “ready” and then drop them like the intergalactic hot potato they already are. AMD may be kicking Intel’s derriere into the next millenium with their higher CPU core count and vastly improving IPC (instructions per cycle), but Apple couldn’t care less. And without monster hardware from the likes of nVidia backing up the games we want to play, where do you think that’s going to put us? With iDevices scaled to desktop sizes, but with the caveat of Apple Thin and nowhere for that heat to go.
If Apple had been serious about keeping as many of us gamers, pros, and developers around through this latest transition, they’d have kept nVidia in the mix, because a very sizeable chunk of both groups rely on their hardware for powering through the content they take part in.
I think Omegal’s actually being very generous with his estimate of even four years left for WoW on the Mac. Blizzard wants to move forward with newer architectural implementations, not backward. They don’t want to be held down by Apple’s never ending cat and mouse game of bugfixes a year too late. And as evidenced by the Intel IGP users referenced by Omegal, those fixes aren’t coming in a timely enough manner, or at all in many cases now. Why should Apple bother fixing something when they’re purposely moving away from that architecture entirely in two years? This leaves Blizzard to make the same conclusion - stall as long as possible with as little resource expenditure to maximize profits. That part may have Activision written all over it, but any company is going to see the writing on the wall at this point. And that writing is Apple will do what it wants whether or not its userbase actually benefits.
Clearly us gamers aren’t on Apple’s radar if we aren’t invested in their iDevice walled garden. They don’t want power users anymore. We propped up Apple when the Mac nearly caused its demise. Now we’re scrap to be jettisoned for Apple’s whims. They’re even pissing off people like my 86 year old grandpa with things like “this movie is now streaming…on Apple TV+ only”. He likes war movies. But he isn’t going to pay hundreds of dollars for a device just for that purpose, especially when he has never used an Apple device in his life. He actually had to ask me what “TV+” was, because he didn’t recognize the Apple symbol next to it. Once I told him he cussed something fierce and wrote off the movie entirely. He isn’t ditching his NetFlix DVD/Blu-Ray subscription for yet another subscription that also requires proprietary hardware.
This is where Apple is going, and I can’t see Blizzard or any other major company really wanting to follow suit. They want to go where the largest number of active users are, and that isn’t iDevice Land.
Fun Fact: I am setting up my the IT infrastructure of an up and coming dentist who is starting a new practice using Open Dental and Apteryx for x-ray imaging. It’s primarily Windows based, though there is currently an Apple (OS X) based suite available too. That dentist has a MacBook Air and asked me to get her onto her network to see the other workstations and the server.
I could log into the network’s router via wifi, but couldn’t see the other computers on the network. Apple’s Mac to Windows networking sucks. Massively. It only actively shows Bonjour and iDevices on networks. You have to jump through literally every hoop possible just to see a Windows computer network, which I needed the MBA to do if I wanted Open Dental to run on it and log into the A to Z folder to see patient charts. Needless to say she finally said to forget it since if I couldn’t get it working after an hour, she’d never be able to work with it if anything required troubleshooting on her end.
All that trouble after I had gone through the network setup, workstation setup, network drive mapping in Windows 10, and getting Open Dental to see the server properly. I knew all of that easily despite having hardly any real in-depth networking experience in Windows 10. I’ve gone through the AppleTalk and Token Ring changes from 20 years ago. I’ve gone through losing proper SMB access with the Finder’s dumbed down networking capabilities outside native OS X. Yet Apple keeps yanking control away from me at every turn to the point that I couldn’t even get the other computers to show up in the Network section of the Finder or have the connected servers on the network appear in the Finder’s sidebar. After an hour of looking up and tinkering with things.
If it isn’t Apple controlled, they’re doing everything they can to shut it out, lock it down, or drive the user away. And developers are taking notice of that. I’ve been debating whether or not to hackintosh my 9900k system I’ve yet to build due to back issues and forego OS X, thus saving me a precious SATA slot for a large data drive for my DVD and Blu-Ray library, or go hackintosh and be forced to use a NAS box for that library as I would be needing to share that library with my Windows install and there aren’t enough lanes for connections outside of an Intel HEDT. Had I been able to afford an Intel HEDT setup I’d be fine as I’d have all the PCIe lanes I needed. That would have made an Intel HEDT type of Mac Pro ultra appealing. Unfortunately, that’s out the window now.
If I want to go OS X, I’ll have to divvy up the 1 TB NVMe drive between the OS and the ever dwindling amount of playable Mac games going forward. I can’t see the appeal of that, can you?
I know this is an extremely technical thread, but I want to kind of bring it back to a simple question. Do we have any actual confirmation that WoW will play on Apple Silicon? Its seems like there is a possibility, but if someone were to go out and buy a system right now and wanted to play WoW, its a major consideration.
I myself didn’t read the fine print when I switched back to Mac. I got a new mini with the intent of adding an eGPU later. ITs ok on Mac OS, but iw as going to use it on bootcamp as well but Apple kinda broke the integration. I know there are workarounds to gt it up and running, its just I don’t want to make those kinds of fixits just have a base device work. In my old age, I just want things to work out of the box with little tweaking - my days of constant dickering with a computer or car is over. I just want to get in and go
Historically I haven’t been as pessimistic as Omegal or Tia. I’m slightly more optimistic, and historically what usually ends up happening is somewhere between the predictions we make.
I’d love to see WoW make the transition to Apple Silicon, but I won’t be surprised if Blizzard stops support for macOS entirely. And even if they don’t, Apple’s going to need to prove that their ARM chips are up to snuff before I even consider playing WoW on them.
I used to be a huge advocate for Mac gaming, but over the last couple years I’ve just started rebooting my hackintosh into Windows to play everything but WoW. WoW is the last game I consistently play on macOS, and I think it’s days are numbered. I don’t even expect Shadowlands to run well on it.
No. There has not been any developer statement one way or the other. The issue hasn’t even been publicly surfaced. I should think the devs are aware, but it’s not on a roadmap yet.
I’m not aware that anyone has tried running WoW on the preview developer workstations yet, which would be an extreme edge case of “confirmation that WoW will play on Apple Silicon”.
Its funny because I was a Mac person ( I worked in graphics industry) and became a Blizzard fan because of it. I bought WC1 and WC2 because they supported Macs. Same with Diablo. I had both systems at home and when EQ came out it was about the time I started working for the dark side and that 17% discount (plus the overall cheaper price) had me go fully PC.
I recently got back into Mac and love it. It would suck if its gone now… Well in a few years after my current system is no longer usable
No direct confirmation yet, but strings found in Shadowlands alpha builds make it look like they’re at least working on it.
It’s possible that they’ll conclude it’s not worth it and can whatever work they had been doing, but I think that’s extremely unlikely. We don’t have great insight into how the game is written, but it already has a very competent Metal engine (probably the best of any Mac game) so unless it has a lot of hardcoded reliance on x86 features, it really shouldn’t be much more difficult than the PPC → Intel jump, which Blizz pulled off way back in patch 1.9 with a considerably more scrappy dev team.