Atm I’m running wow on a 2017 iMac with a radeon graphics card. And it’s struggling with terrible load times, lag, etc.
My 2017 15" MacBook Pro plays the game smoothly, without a hint of problems.
Which is… annoying but I’m pretty sure caused by the game trying to force itself to deal with the iMacs large screen. I’ve tried reducing the resolution on my desktop (which is irritating) while reducing the resolution scale to 50% makes the game look… pretty bad. Playing in small window mode is about the only thing thats vaguely worked but at that point? I’m far better on my MacBook.
Any suggestions welcome!
I also have a 2017 imac with a radeon. It struggled mostly due to having a Fusion hard drive. I purchased a Samsung SSD usb drive and copied WOW to it. The performance change was dramatic! Much better. Also set the graphics to the recommended settings… and then turn down various settings one at a time to see how that affects the performance.
1 Like
I’ll try that. The fusion drive is pretty horrible and glad they’ve ditched it! 
Well to be honest, Apple made the performance of the Fusion drive worse when they switched to the APFS file system. That system made performance on all but SSD drives crap out.
Fusion drives were a combination of SSD and mechanical drives, the SSD part was faster, but also extremely expensive in larger storage sizes. Mechanical drives were slower, but extremely cheap in the larger storage sizes (by comparison).
They resulted in faster machines, but only when the file system played nicely with both types of drives. HFS+ was the file system in place when these first came out. When APFS became the default file system, mechanical drives took a massive hit. Fusion drives suffered because of this.
So if you were running HFS+, your machine would be a bit more snappier. In a nutshell, Fusion drives were an interim design meant to bridge the gap until SSD drive prices started to come down.
While SSDs are still pretty expensive in the larger TB sizes, they are more reasonable at the 1TB and below sizes. For boot drives, it makes sense to have an SSD these days. For actual physical storage, mechanical drives can still be the better option due to cost. 4TB drives can be as cheap as a 512GB SSD drive.
Doesn’t help that the game itself uses CASC, which in and of itself makes the game slow down over time no matter what drive you are running it on. APFS imposed slow downs and CASC over time combined = poor load times in WoW.
Even with an SSD, you will need to periodically reinstall WoW to clean up the CASC… or it will slow down.
1 Like
Mentioned this ages ago and meant to do a follow up.
Since my first post I’ve done a complete reinstall of wow and… nothing’s changed. The initial log into the game takes maybe… 2 minutes? After that zoning is slow but not as bad, maybe twice as long as my partner’s old pc does.
I’m sure part of it is a fusion drive but it never used to do this before Shadowlands/9.0.
Install wow on an ssd. A USB C drive preferred.
Maybe.
Atm I’d just like to find a way of getting the performance a bit faster if there’s any obvious reason its decayed so badly with the new expansion.
The iMac has 4 ports - At minute 3 are taking up with a Logitech, a Tartarus, and my wireless headphones (none of which seem to work through a USB extender). The remaining slot I use to swap out whatever I’m charging at that moment.
So I could buy a portable SSD and plug it in, but then I lose that last slot.
Trust me from experience an ssd makes an entire world of difference especially using on the USB C interface. Looks like your Mac has 2 USB c ports, there little things next to the regular USB ports.
It’s the OS you are running that is crippling your machine. Mojave and later forced APFS onto everyone’s machine whether their hardware was suited for it or not.
If you have an older Mac (any system sporting a Fusion drive is considered old)… get yourself an external drive. Format it with MacOS Extended (DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT, FORMAT IT APFS UNLESS IT IS AN SSD DRIVE). Install WoW, Battlenet and all there. Don’t move it there. Remove it from your system first, and install fresh to the new drive.
Mechanical drives are just fine. Not 120 FPS fine, but sufficient. If you’re obsessed over frame rate, buy a new computer.
SSDs are obviously faster (but not as fast as an internal SSD).
You can probably just replace your internal drive with an SSD (best solution, but not for the faint of heart).
Some options:
http-s://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/imac
Reality is, with each new expansion, the load on your system, graphics and otherwise goes up. It’s the nature of the beast. Thus, do not ever compare performance from one expansion to another as they are not the same.
Performance on Classic should be much better, but keep in mind it uses the same modern engine that retail does, so it’s not that light weight code of 2004… it’s much more bloated today.