How big is the impact of CASC/APFS on somewhat modern SSDs? I’ve been running APFS on Samsung EVO (not pro) drives with TRIM disabled for years now for both games and development and have noticed no degradation at all.
As for Catalina I had one upgraded machine which exhibited a bit of weirdness, but all other upgraded machines and fresh installs have been fine. In fact, so far my fresh Catalina Hackintosh install has performed better in every way than the High Sierra install it replaced ever did.
even on fastest NVMe drives, you still notice increased loading time and object pop in when entering world after mere weeks/months. It’s still only seconds and not a full lockup like on HDDs, but the fact you still have bad loading times at all on an SSD, especially an ultra fast NVMe, is pretty pathetic. Even blizzards own mac people go out of their way to put wow on an HFS+ partition than deal with how bad APFS is for casc. now if only they’d fix casc but that’s unlikely.
Yes, it is. Uninstall and reinstall the game. Marvel in the newfound loading speed because b-tree nodes and metadata aren’t scattered everywhere forcing a ton of random 4k reads on the drive. It’s a guarantee that will be the case. Both CASC and APFS degrade in performance over time. Put the two together and they play off each other in marvelously insidious ways.
The part that scares me is where they say its “on a new engine”. That probably means its on the Overwatch engine which seems to port to everything but Mac? It ports to PC, Xbox, PS4 and Switch… I am being very selective for what games I support on bootcamp. I will not support Blizzard due to their horrible way of flipping on its devoted Mac base. Just the part where they left the Overwatch icon on the Mac client ticks me off. I will skip Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 if they ignore Mac. The suits at Blizzard/Activision are ruining my love for Blizzard.
Overwatch was more Apple’s fault than Blizzard’s. By the time Blizzard got any real support for working with Metal the ship had sailed on management approving Overwatch for the Mac. Apple still drags its feet on gaming other than its own niche like Apple Arcade or iOS projects. Otherwise we’d have better gaming hardware since they control not just their OS, but their computers as well.
D4 I don’t know about just yet, but given that Overwatch 2 is woven so tightly into Overwatch 1 with its model, there’s a really high chance it won’t come to the Mac at all. That would create a disjointed experience for users that haven’t played Overwatch 1. Of course, If OW2 does happen to come to the Mac maybe there’s a chance OW1 is brought over as well.
But right now I wouldn’t hold my breath. With the politics Apple is playing with nVidia, one of Blizzard’s premiere partners, that may be enough influence to stop either OW from ever seeing the light of day on OS X (Blizzard is looking to make use of the RTX specific features in Shadowlands, and Apple is blocking nVidia from even making drivers for previous generations of its GPUs commonly used in Mac Pro 5,1 systems). Apple’s anti-trust violations are very likely to end up hurting gamers a great deal. It’s the reason I won’t even consider Apple Arcade. I’m not going to subsidize their ruination of gaming outside of their little walled garden.
Of course, in my case even if OW1 were on the Mac I couldn’t play it despite having a hackintosh more than capable and very soon a newer hackintosh that could run it in sleep mode (exaggerations FTW! ) because it still lacks full controller customization that even Unreal Tournament had in Mac OS 9…twenty years ago. Disabilities suck.
As someone who started with Blizzard back in the nineties with Orcs and Humans because they fully supported the Mac platform, this is sorely disappointing. I wasn’t concerned as much with Overwatch because I had heard of the technical limitations at the time but Diablo is a beloved game for me. Not to have Diablo for MacOS feels like losing an old friend.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone yet seen positive confirmation from Blizzard that D4 is Windows-only (not counting consoles)?
If not, I’d be nice to get a definite yes or no from a Blue at this point, just so we know where we stand. If it’s a no, Mac fans won’t be happy, but at least we could plan accordingly.
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion Blizzard is trying to remain neutral for as long as they can, and are hoping to ride out the current political bruehaha between Apple and nVidia before making an announcement. But if it does on long enough, Blizzard’s hand will be forced, and likely not to our benefit. Because of this, I wouldn’t expect a yea or nay anytime soon.
I very much doubt nvidia/apple thing has anything to do with it. It’ll be purely based on whether or not blizzard still wants to support mac with engineering costs or if they think they’ll save money dropping mac. Only time will tell.
Do we have any indication if Blizzard will drop Mac support for WoW? I’m considering a new MBP 16 and would hate to drop 3k only to have them abandon it. WoW and Classic are the only games I play
I don’t see Blizzard dropping WoW support. It’s got a rather large userbase on either platform. And for some (like me until necessary features were removed preventing me from playing anymore) OS X offers a more accessible means of playing the game. It just handles HID better than Windows in many respects, which is a plus for disabled folks.
I’m fairly confident WoW is safe. It’s the future titles we’re worried about.
A bit part of things is the perception regarding games on the Mac. Apple still puts out crap hardware and uses even crappier GPUs, leaving users with no alternatives. The nVidia thing plus Catalina might make Blizzard reconsider non-essential Mac support going forward. Apple is after all making it harder for Blizzard to implement features it wants in its games by cutting off the hardware most capable of utilizing those features.
Thanks for the response. Preliminary testing of the new 16” with 4GB 5500M are showing 55-60 FPS at graphics setting 6-7 and native screen res. This to me seems quite impressive. At 1440p it should easily be able to handle 60fps. In fact the 8GB 5500M may can hit it at native. I’m very excited to try it out
That’s pretty exciting, can’t remember the last time MacBook GPUs didn’t feel underpowered. I don’t play on laptops often but it’s nice to know that buying a Windows laptop won’t be necessary to get decent graphics horsepower.
There’s another issue here that no one has mentioned. The impending switch by Apple to ARM CPUs for any consumer device. Give it another 2 years, and we’ll likely see this happen. Another 5 years and the MacPro will likely be the only non-ARM system they have.
Unfortunately, that GPU is only in the range of a Vega 48 at best. The 8GB version is what really saves it. It’s still not impressive by other gaming standards, but WoW is much less GPU dependent, so it’s not bad. I don’t think it would hold up for either the new Diablo or Overwatch, if they made it to the Mac.
) because it still lacks full controller customization that even Unreal Tournament had in Mac OS 9…