Warcraft reforge release date announced. we’re now just a month from that, and the beta still says “not available for mac”
the last time this happened, was Overwatch. Entire beta was PC only yet blizzard stayed quiet about mac support until it launched and then said “oh btw, we’re just not doing mac version”
I have a pretty good feeling warcraft 3 reforged is PC only, and expect same thing with Diablo 4 and most certainly overwatch 2. It seems the path going forward is existing games that support mac will continue to do so, but any new games consider it unlikely
Completely ridiculous, it’s easier to support macOS now that it’s ever been. Trivial even compared to what had to be done to keep the Mac OpenGL engine in sync with the DirectX engine back in the day.
I have to imagine that this is the work of a bean counter somewhere.
You seen the problems they’ve had with Catalina on every game thus far? Had you said that prior to 10.15’s release, I’d agree. Now, not so much. The latest and greatest has been nothing short of a nightmare for both players and developers alike across the board. And Apple going out of its way to block one of the two GPU manufacturers entirely isn’t making things any easier on anyone.
If we don’t get future games on the OS X side, I’d wager that Blizzard sees where this is all going with regard to Apple and cutting its losses now.
Apple is putting more and more restrictions on developers, making doing development for macOS almost as restrictive as iOS is. Apple is literally one step away from finally yanking the ability for third party developers to sell to users from outside the App Store.
Some of what’s going on with current games is Apple’s fault - they just plain broke some stuff in Catalina and are being their usual slow as molasses selves in getting the issues fixed. Some issues are “growing pains” that always come with new OS iterations. But the overarching theme here is that developing has become much harder for OS X, not easier, with Catalina’s release. It’s nice to finally have a unified path for graphics APIs (OpenGL is being removed entirely by a lot of developers, including emulator devs), but the hoops many devs have to jump through to make it work really makes it harder to justify the extra time needed for OS X.
I do hope I’m wrong and Blizzard comes through with a nice surprise for its Mac fans. But the realist in me says that is a very unlikely scenario given the current playing field with Apple trying to take control over everything (you can’t even put your own solid state storage into the new Mac Pro’s NVMe connectors as those are proprietary and tied to the T2 chip in the machine, which third party SSDs can’t access).
I’ve been an Apple fanboy for most of my life, having used Macs since the 128k and even their computers from the Apple // onward, with all of my computers prior to my hackintosh being Macs. Hell, I even went through the very rough process of learning to successfully put together a hackintosh just to run OS X, my favorite OS ever. But I just don’t see new Mac dev coming out of Blizzard in the current corporate political environment, especially since Apple is blocking one of Blizzard’s premiere partners (nVidia). That’s why I didn’t save up for the new Mac Pro and instead invested in parts for a modern hackintosh. That way if things didn’t come to fruition in OS X, I’d have a system capable of playing them all at really good settings in Windows.
None of the announcements I’ve seen anywhere even mention the Mac. Sadly it isn’t hard to see why these days.
To be fair though, this round of Apple OS releases has been rough across the board… it’s hardly restricted to macOS, and it went down like that due to obvious and easily preventable causes. It seems they’ve already taken action to prevent that from happening next year, so it should be better going forward based on that alone.
You know what I think about the Nvidia situation, and I continue to be convinced it’s not entirely Apple’s problem. Regardless of anything else, Nvidia should be a little more willing to collaborate… graphics drivers have kernel access, and that’s something that Apple has been taking ever more seriously over the years due to the security threat that represents.
There’s definitely a “growing pains” component, moreso in Catalina than previous releases. A good deal of things under the hood have been shaken up, much of which is because of things that were formerly impossible or impractical to do while still supporting 32-bit.
As far as restrictiveness goes, that’s a rising trend in commercial operating systems period, whether they be from Apple, Google, or Microsoft. The entire reason why Valve has been dumping money into Linux gaming is because they feel that Windows will eventually squeeze them out, which is probably not all that unrealistic.
Anyway, no matter what happens I won’t ever be maining Windows as my desktop OS. Some flavor of Linux maybe, but never Windows. I definitely get the attraction to self-built machines over prebuilt Macs, especially with crazy bang-for-buck hardware like the 3950X now being available (and hackintoshable!) but I won’t lie, the buttery smoothness of a Mac Pro is still alluring, despite its costs and restrictions. It makes me wish I had a business so I could write a Mac Pro and XDR display off on my taxes, lol.
The nvidia thing with apple poses interesting issues for blizzard, which is a HUGE nvidia partner. nvidia provides the machines at blizzcon. nvidia works closely with blizzard on their graphics features. one of the biggest features of 9.0 is integration of nvidia ONLY features like RTX and VRS. features AMD promises will come “eventually” but nividia is already pushing second generation versions out in 2020.
so you look at an apple eccosystem that alienates nvidia, one of blizzards biggest partners and you start to wonder. and if a partner like nvidia leaned on blizzard and said “screw apple, we’ll give you even more access, more hardware if you streamline your projects for nvidia hardware on windows”
this of course is purely speculative but I know for a fact engine is NOT issue for stuff not coming to mac. it’s all political backroom stuff. even overwatch 1 could have come to mac 3 years ago. it couldn’t LAUNCH on mac because metal wasn’t mature enough, but it’s been mature enough for years now, they even had a prototype a team of 3 engineers put together that was RUNNING overwatch on mac until someone from higher up scrapped the whole thing for undisclosed reasons.
Now we have no WC3 beta, and they’ve been totally mute on diablo 4 and overwatch 2. something political is going on, NOT technical. This goes beyond 10.15 issues or anything like that. This is someone behind the scenes with high clout trying to snuff apple out. My bet is on nvidia. Retaliation.
/tinfoil hat
Not having WC3 Reforged on mac would strike me as a very very poor PR move given that they’ve been taking pre-orders for it for quite a while now. (And while they don’t have any details up on their systems requirements page, they do have sections for both Windows and macOS on that page, so mac OS support is still implied.)
Sure, you can say that the mac gaming community is small, but I would think taking money from people for a product you never intended for them to be able to use is going to make even non-mac users pause in the future when it comes to your products.
For someone who pre-ordered War 3 reforged on day one, to play on a Mac… If they announce (Or worse, silently say nothing for that matter) after all this time it doesn’t have a Mac Client, then I will be highly disappointed in Blizzard, and they are clearly sending a message that MacOS is sadly not going to be supported for any future games.
If I am forced to use boot camp, or even Parallels, to play a remastered game from how many years ago, that was also originally fully supported on a Mac in the first place? Come on… I guess I will need to ask for a refund…
I truly hope that is not Blizzard’s intent. MacOS is a growing platform, and the progress made to Metal has been great, so less support makes no sense.
Plus for someone that does have the new 2019 New Mac Pro (w/ Pro Vega II 32GB - no I didn’t buy it for gaming, it is for 8K Final Cut/Motion editing) can play any of these games at full resolution, at max/ultra settings, just beautifully… I was truly hoping for more games to be able to play natively…
It was a few years ago. But as Omegal said, between the hard cut off of nVidia and the pretty severe bugginess of the last couple waves of OS’s from Apple, macOS has lost a lot of ground with 3rd party developers.
I’ve been a heavy supporter of Mac gaming for a long time. Like 80% of the posts I’ve ever made on all of Blizzard’s forums were in defense of it. But even I’ve started to throw in the towel.
In all seriousness, I think Apple’s in for a dark time in the next few years in terms of user satisfaction. They won’t be struggling financially, but Apple’s never had a lot of “good will” stored with their pro user or developer communities. They’re always throwing in major stipulations about how to use their platforms, and I think the future looks grim as Apple tightens the screws with things like the T2 chip.
They are currently advertising that Warcraft III: Reforged will be coming to macOS on its pre-order page, so this is a disappointing thing to read. If there’s been no beta for it then obviously it’s not coming out for the platform. What scummy conduct.
Does any blue want to chime in here and let us know if we should be processing refunds now instead of next month?
Its interesting you say that, because the 2019 Mac Pro is a great example of the complete opposite of what you say, IMO. It’s almost like a 180 degree turn for them.
Yes it’s expensive, I will say it again, yes it is expensive, and It is complete overkill for normal consumers/gamers… but for pro users, time is money, and man this thing saves time…
They finally have made a NEW fully upgraded-able machine in almost every way. From the things they are 100% allowing users to install/upgrade themselves, with documentation to go along with it, to what has already been proven/shown for additional parts that can be upgraded if you so choose too. The only thing people are complaining about at this point, is that you can’t upgrade the SSD’s that are tied to the built in T-2. Yet today OWC releases a PCIe M.2 NVMe SSD card (up to 8TB) that goes 6000 MB/s, so does that even matter at this point, nope.
And yes I get the Nvidia issue… but the Pro Vega II graphics card is completely ridiculously powerful, and I am sure the W9700 that is also coming out will be blazing fast. The fact that the Mac Pro is able to support all (Almost all?) new AMD cards natively is huge win, especially for someone who wants to upgrade overtime.
To that point eGPU support on Thunderbolt 3 machines has been getting better and better with each release… so even a MacBook Air or a Mac mini can have now have a “dedicated” graphics card.
That being said, hopefully 10.15.3 brings some graphic card improvements, as I think someone said before .3 is usually the version for that.
It isn’t. The new Mac Pro is little more than a publicity stunt for Apple. Apple would very much prefer to have an all-in-one solution. They tried it with the Trash Can and were bashed by everyone for it. Then they tried to wait things out, having developers optimize their pro apps to such a degree that they could sell them as running well on Macbooks and iMacs. Apple wanted the iMac Pro to be “good enough”.
But when the constant cries of the fans didn’t stop, Apple finally relented and took a step back to a full tower design. But they don’t want many people to buy it. Unlike the PowerMacs and the old Mac Pro towers, the new Mac Pro is priced completely out of range for the enthusiast and independant content creator. They want creative studios like Pixar and other such businesses to buy it in bulk, but no small business or individual creator can possibly afford it in an acceptable configuration. Hell, my $1300 hackintosh almost matches the new Mac Pro in performance. It’s not worth what they’re charging, no matter how over-engineered it is.
Apple’s offering this new Mac Pro as a means to quiet the media on their issue of not having a high end hardware option, but they’ve priced it to be unattainable by the vast majority of people that were asking for it in the first place.
The XDR Display itself is an exception. That thing matches reference monitors at a fraction of the price. The XDR Display is amazing for what it is. The stand on the other hand is a joke, and Apple knows it. The people who are buying this monitor are mounting it to their existing VESA setups and ignoring the stand.
I used to buy Macs all the time. I’ve owned PowerMacs, Powerbooks, Macbook Pros, and several iPods/iPhones/iPads. I’ve also had jobs in the past where I used the old Apple pro app suite of Final Cut Pro, Motion, Shake, Logic, Aperture, etc.
When Apple abandoned the pro segment, I, along with thousands of other people, used our Mac Pros until they died and then finally invested in Windows or Linux based setups. In a lot of cases we had to spend a ton of money for new suites of software, plugins, and support on top of new hardware.
Apple waiting this long to release the new Mac Pro is more of an insult than anything because I promise you a lot of us older Pro Apple users aren’t spending even more money to switch our entire workflows back.
On the software side, despite macOS gaining some new cool tech and APIs over the years, like Metal, overall I think the OS has actually regressed somewhat since the days of Tiger and Leopard… at least in terms of the end user experience. Each new OS release has had more and more bugs at release, and personally I REALLY hate the forcing of switching desktop spaces when I fullscreen an app.
I still like macOS better than Windows or Linux as my daily driver, and I still use it as my default OS when I’m not gaming. However Apple has just done too much at this point for me to keep believing they listen to their core user base.
macOS is still pretty good at a lot of things, but Apple’s narrowed their focus on acceptable use cases where using their machines made sense, and now the only use cases left are a very short list of niche cases.
I used to love Macs, but I just cannot in good conscious recommend Apple hardware to most people anymore. I just can’t.
If the baseline Mac Pro were $3000 cheaper, and I could upgrade it on the BTO page to a usable state for a total of $5000-$7000, maybe then I could justify it. As it is, I can’t.
More generally, I think people are way too fixated on not having Nvidia. AMD’s cards are more than capable for most things your average person would buy a discrete GPU for, and with the 16" MBP Apple has been getting better at making AMD’s more powerful options available in their devices. If you truly need CUDA and can’t migrate to less restrictive tools that’s one thing but most people don’t fall into that bucket. Most don’t fall into the bucket of needing the tip-toppest most powerful GPU either. The impression I get is that it’s mostly just bandwagoning and misplaced optimization, not unlike world questers and LFR heroes mimicking world-class mythic raiders and streamers with minmaxing they’ll never actually need.
You have to understand that it’s not just about not having the best cards (cause they are). it’s about the ramifications of apple alienating a company with so much influence, and literally the leader in gaming. In fact in general apple has been alientating gaming for a long time. Nvidia is just about EVERYONES gaming partner. For apple to basically flip nvidia the bird is like flipping the gaming industry the bird, and it affects how OTHER developers see apple. When OTHER developers see the nvidia/apple situation they are less likely to commit to the platform. It starts out losing nvidia cards, but ends up being losing a lot more down the road, count on it.
the TL/DR of it is, apple are basically a-holes to work with, and the nvidia situation being as public as it was, sheds a lot of light on it. If apple doesn’t change their attitude, they are going to lose what little grasp they have left in gaming industry.
But isn’t it a two-way street? The Apple situation along with how Nvidia has interacted with the Linux kernel devs, has firmly cemented them as extremely unpleasant to work with. They’re bullies — Nvidia basically expects OS development to be shaped to their whims and they’ll abuse their power to make trouble for any that stand in the way of that. Why are devs and users alike so willing to support that? Shouldn’t there be a push to break Nvidia’s captive markets free?
It is a two way street, yes, but the people who care are in a different market segment.
AMD has always had it’s fans, and there’s no denying that their push for low level APIs like Mantle, Vulkan, and Metal, along with hardware architectures that favored them forced nVidia to follow suit. But nVidia’s big revenue isn’t from their gaming cards. It’s from workstation and SoC embedded solutions. The gaming card portion of their business is literally just from spillover part yields that were’t good enough for industrial use in their workstations. And they’ve made a complete monopoly out of that.
nVidia is more than 10x the size of AMD’s graphics division. If they wanted to, they could invest some more money and resources and jump even further ahead. The thing is that they don’t have to.
AMD’s gained a lot of new fandom with it’s recent successes with Vega, Navi, and Ryzen. From the outside it looks like they’ve been sticking it to nVidia and Intel on two very different GPU and CPU fronts. But the truth is that nVidia and Intel got way ahead of everyone else 10 years ago, and have been at a near standstill since. Without competition, they’ve dragged their feet until their only real competitor, a single company that is a fraction of the size of either of them, caught up.
Sure, Apple has had the clout and the resources to ignore nVidia and still do okay, but honestly Apple isn’t much better than nVidia as far as enforcing a totalitarian hold on their segment of the marketshare.
It’s two selfish kids telling each other they can’t play with each other’s toys after they played together and broke a toy the other had. And the rest of the playground just wants to ignore the fight because it’s childish and awkward while at the same time accepting that these are the two most popular kids on the playground.
It sends a bad message, but the fans of either company, gamers and Mac users, also kind of hate each other, so there’s no unified pressure to make nVidia and Apple make up.
Yep. No user upgradeable NVMe on the backside of the Mac Pro’s motherboard. It’s tied directly to the T2 chip, which third parties cannot access. No MPX designs have been shared with nVidia either I’d wager, making it harder for them to get a good card out for the pros in a Mac Pro now. Then there’s the notarization thing that is now mandatory. No Apple signage? Welp, you can get bent.
I’m halfway over the fence on the hackintosh part for my new rig. I’ll be forced to run 10.13.6 because Mojave and later have no nVidia drivers, so using MacOS will be more and more of a pain as time goes on, especially with Blizzard, whom knock off support as often as Apple abandons their OSes (Blizzard’s support cutoffs are directly related to those abandomnents).
OpenGL doesn’t run properly at all in Catalina, so even games like Diablo 3 have issues, assuming you can manage to even get it to install. It’s all a mess. A huge /headdesking mess.
There are no requirements listed either. Ironically, for either platform. This is highly irregular on Blizzard’s part because they want players to know if they can play the games before buying into them.
The blues are going to be tongue tied here I’m afraid. Legal almost certainly has that mandated right now.
That’s a red herring, and is still awful because you have to give up PCIe slots just to have good NVMe performance. That’s just nuts. And you also can’t install any outside OS except Windows (again, T2 getting in the way), and Apple is only reluctantly letting users install Windows. No linux on your Mac Pro even though a decent chunk of the pro world does in fact use linux, and sometimes rather heavily at that.
Except for VRAM, the 2080Ti easily roasts any of the GPUs available for the Mac Pro. The Vege Pro II Duo is the only one that beats them, but only because it has two GPUs onboard. But that won’t matter for games because CrossFire X doesn’t exist in OS X, thus games can only use one of the two GPUs. So color me unimpressed by the hype.
The same could be said of nVidia if Apple would actually stop doing what they’re doing to them. Conveniently left that part out, didn’t you? Apple “natively supporting” most of the AMD GPUs comes down to simply having the framebuffer in the drivers that are shared between those AMD GPUs. Much the same way a single driver could support any of the variious Pascal GPUs (including the Titan) on nVidia’s web driver side.
Again, eGPU support that allows only AMD. Newsflash: There are now AMD only functions in Metal in Catalina. Yep, nVidia cards wouldn’t be able to use them. You starting to see the anti-trust pattern here?
Oh hells yes. Also, did you know that those “fullscreen” switches like that are not exclusive fullscreen? That means any app that forces this kind of fullscreen will suffer the same issues that WoW suffers for disabled gamers - anything can cause loss of app focus and once that happens, whatever we’re using to work with the app stops working. Yay.
Once I figure out how to properly move my Apple Mail files and data over to Thunderbird, OS X will no longer be my main OS. I’ll be able to take the Thunderbird data and just import it into Thunderbird in Windows, copy the same passwords I used for 2FA in Apple Mail, and be done. Boom, instant Windows as main OS. All because Apple doesn’t care about anything except controlling everything you do.
Believe it or not, nVidia isn’t asking for OSes to be shaped for them. In this particular case, Apple wants nVidia to hand over all drivers to them. They don’t want nVidia making their own drivers even though they know their GPUs best. Why? So Apple can lock support to only that which they deem fit, whereas nVidia will support their entire range of cards so users can choose what fits their budgetary and gaming needs best. But if that happened, Apple wouldn’t be in control, which is what it wants most. That’s why we’re here today bemoaning so much of what’s coming out of Area 52 (Apple).
Remember, I used to beta test hardware for AMD. I even had their Remote Wonder device before it came out and the unit I had wasn’t what it eventually became. It became a device that was kept outside of the computer. My prototype was a PCI card (for the G4 tower) with the tuner (and no IR blaster) on it. Thankfully the Sapphire Radeon HD3800 GPUs they sent me for the Mac Pro were essentially finished designs - they just wanted stress tests done on games to make sure their drivers didn’t suck like the X1000 and X2000 series did. I stayed with AMD all the way until I made my first hackintosh. nVidia just had them floored for performance, and still do. When a review has to go so far as to use the Radeon Vega Pro II Duo vs. a Titan RTX to get a win for AMD…yeah. I think that speaks for itself.
Do you know for certain that Apple writes macOS AMD drivers entirely independently? It’s not impossible but it does at minimum seem unlikely. I figured that since AMD is extremely open with their Linux drivers, they had no problem letting Apple fork their common driver codebase and work from there, which seems pretty reasonable to me since Apple is well known for fine tuning things on a per-model basis – for example, they slightly undervolt the CPU and GPU on the 16" MBP to reduce likelyhood of thermal throttling and keep boost clocks high as possible for as long as possible. These tweaks are done in software because they vanish if you boot into Windows.
If Apple is expecting Nvidia to write macOS drivers from an entirely separate codebase, that is a little crazy but it just seems so unlikely to me. It would make a lot more sense if all they want is some code sharing/collaboration so Nvidia’s drivers aren’t total black boxes.
Either way I’ve been pretty pleased with the AMD drivers in Catalina, which so far have given me less trouble than Nvidia’s web drivers did under macOS and AMD’s drivers do under Windows, so Apple must be doing something right.
We already know this isn’t true because Apple has had their own nVidia drivers for years alongside nVidia’s own more expansive drivers. That’s how it’s so obvious what Apple is doing here. Apple’s own nVidia drivers remain in the later OSes, but nVidia’s own aren’t allowed in.
They actually contract intel and AMD developers to work on apple campus. employees who work, well workED for intel and AMD, but now answer to apple. They tried to get nvidia to do this but nvidia said “our guys answer to us, not you” and apple was like “well get bent then”. So technically they are engineers who know the drivers, the code and hardware, but they relinquish all control to apple. they become effectively apple employees via their sub contract.
when it comes to nvidia drivers, from what understand nvidia sends them the source code, apple strips out gpus they don’t include in macs, and then builds them. yes apple intentionally makes sure the built in driver is crippled just so nvidia hardware that’s better than AMD hardware can’t be used.
that driver 10.14 and 10.15 have? you think apple wrote it? nVidia provided the source, apple just built them. However, apple continued to ensure they only supported nvidia chips in shipping macs.
The web driver that nvidia used to make which was basically the SAME DRIVER THEY GIVE APPLE was blocked by apple for 10.14+. Generally speaking the web driver is also based on newer code too since apple often lags behind quite a bit with updating their builds of driver.
Apple has always hated the web driver, because they wanted control of the driver handed over, completely, not just source code so they can build their own for OS updates, but the engineer handed over and web driver scrapped. That, among other things, is why we are were we are today.
So do 10.14 and 10.15 drivers exist, obviously yes, but apple guts them, and blocks nvidia from releasing ungutted ones. period.
