Not sure if this is the right place … but right now setting the Water Detail to anything higher than “Fair” absolutely tanks the frame rate.
If the current water shader can’t be made performant on Mac’s GPUs perhaps they can create a replacement that’s better suited to the Mac - even if it looks different as long as it looks better than the “Fair” setting.
What are the specs of your Mac?
Im on Mac Studio, M2 Ultra, 64GB purchased 2024 and the water for me looks amazing on High, and I usually keep it at Good for general playing (which looks great too) to keep the strain low.
M4 iMac 10 CPU / 10 GPU cores, aka baseline, 24GiB RAM, purchased end of 2024.
Wish we had a choice of water shader. I rather use an old fashion “static” shader if it means better performance and better looking water at the expense of it being less interactive.
Last I heard, not anytime soon. It was explained to me it’s just a technical issue with how the water rendering method is poorly handled by tile based rendering (what apple silicon uses). Basically, the code is old, very old. I doubt it’s been touched in over a decade really and it’s written specifically for specific type of gpu, the kind that apple abandoned with apple silicon. The code would need a complete rewrite to not perform terribly on apple silicon.
Yes you can over spec it and still get respectable fps, but if you’re like me and prefer 4k/60 over 1080p or 1440p with every other setting dialed up, chances are you’re turning water down to good or fair or you have an Ultra.
For those curious, MSAA also has poor performance on apple silicon compared to PC of equiv specs. That one is more specifically hardware issue than software. dedicated gpus for years have had optimized handling of MSAA and for some reason apple skimped there. It’s why we don’t get even MSAA 8x (it’s not even hardware possible) and 4x isn’t as performant as it should be. Technically you can achieve 8x by applying 4x twice but performance cost would be really bad so blizzard locks apple silicon to 4x max.
Frankly, I won’t mind if Blizzard just outright replaced the water shader with another for the Mac client. If they don’t have the time to write another, maybe they can just buy an off the shelf water shader.
I don’t really care if it’s not dynamic as long as it looks nice - between performant and dynamic, I choose performant.
P.S. One thing I don’t get is why the current water shader seems to lack specular highlights. That’s a very cheap effect from what I know.
I always figured it was down to lack of memory bandwidth on my machine. MSAA has always been expensive though. You are basically doing extra rendering on the edges that need to be smoothed out.
I had water above that. Highest settings too “unrealistic” for me like plastic. View Distance, textures and foliage on max.
The fps issues now seems last patch related. Turned on triple buffering as others suggested.
Running 4K at 50% render scale with fidelity scaling.
M2 Pro Mac Mini.
The water killing performance happened before last patch too.
I remember in DF there was an issue.
I thought it was fixed in TWW.
Exactly which M series versions are being affected?
So far everyone here is either using a M4 or a M2.
I have an M3 chip (forget which one), but I can run water at High no issues.
the poor performance of water is not a new issue and it affects all apple silicon and likely always will.
It’s not a bug or regression caused by recent patch, it’s just an issue with the current technique used by engine not designed well for rendering techniques of tile based gpus.
So if you don’t have really powerful mac water is always best candidate to turn down first to “fair” or good’
it also has nothing to do with the textures or shaders. It’s all about technique.
Is the shader the technique? It’s literally a small program that tells the GPU how to draw the water.
I run on good. Don’t like the look of high or near invisible of fair.
I seem to not be affected as much. Maybe the M2 Pro is hiding the bad ?
Maybe.
I tried Good again by turning down shadows and SSAO. Seems alright in Hallowfall and Ringing Deeps … then I went to Siren Isles and the frame rate just became a mess.
I think I might just have a crap GPU. LOL Probably the lack of memory bandwidth is hurting graphics performance - only 120GB/s unified memory vs 200GB/s on the M2 Pro.
That said, surely there are better looking water shaders that perform at Fair’s level.