Classic WoW on Mac?

Hi all, has anyone played the beta on a Mac or know if classic will be playable on a Mac?

One of my buddies is lukewarm about trying classic but definitely wont if he cant use his Mac to play.

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It seemed to work just fine for me during the stress test. I didn’t take the time to mess with the settings or anything, but nothing out of the ordinary seemed to happen just for being on a mac.

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For a Mac, probably have to run at a lower resolution than what the screen is. If its an older one that uses a HDD, likely would help to change that to a SSD and make sure there’s plenty of RAM.

Really depends on your friend’s Macs specs. I’ve saved a few dying/dead older Macs simply by installing SSD, optionally more RAM helps too.

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I’ve played the Classic Beta on an older 2013 MBP with integrated Intel Iris graphics and on a newer MBA with integrated Intel graphics and they both work great, though at lower settings (and I haven’t tried 40-man raids). If you have a beefier desktop or a MBP with dedicated Radeon graphics you should be golden.

Classic uses the same engine as BfA, but it uses it to display older, simpler models with low-res textures, so if you can play BfA you can play Classic fine. As others have pointed out, you might run into issues if you’re playing on an ancient Mac with 4GB of RAM and a spinning drive, like 2010 or older. But WoW scales pretty well on older hardware, and the biggest issue you’ll run into on really old systems is outdated video hardware with no Metal support.

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Are any of you still using Yosemite?

It would be the same requirements as retail.

10.12 (Sierra) is the min requirements
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/76459

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Runs beautifully on my iMac. And it’s nothing special.

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
4 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4 GB

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I played the stress test on my Mac at work during breaks. It’s a janky old 2015 Mac Mini but it handled WoW on graphics setting 4 with a solid 50fps the entire time with only integrated video. If that potato of a Mac can run it, any Mac made in the last 5 years should be able to.

I remember playing vanilla on my iBook G4 and thought it was awesome. Ah the good ol’ days.

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Stupid Question…we learned months ago that my wifes old Mac Pro (desktop) wouldnt run the new retail expansion because of the “Apple Metal API” support issue, but I am hearing now they built Classic on the same engine?

We tried launching Classic today for the stress test and got the following error:

“Your 3D accelerator card is not supported by World of Warcraft. Please install a 3D accelerator card with dual-TMU support.”

Is this the same issue as the Apple Metal API, or is it just the video card?

I had assumed that this “Apple Metal API” issue only applied to MacBOOKS (laptops) which had a built-in integrated GPU which could not be changed, but that if you had a Mac Desktop (with an replaceable dedicated Video Card) this shouldnt be a problem. We have a Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 580 8GB…thought this would be more than adequate, but I get the error.

Is it true that no matter what video card we put in this 2009 MacPro Desktop, it wont run Classic?

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The min system requirements are posted in the stickied thread at the top regarding the stress test.

You can find it here: (metal capable GPU is required for all macs)
WoW Classic Pre-Launch Test 11:00 a.m. PDT August 8 and Minimum Specs

I works fine on Mac.

I’m just here to figure out how to download and use addons for classic wow on a mac.

The exact same way you would on Windows.

Download the addon and put it in your /World of Warcraft/_classic_/Interface/Addons folder.

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