Just ordered one of these for home:
m2 ultra studio
192GB ram
76 core gpu
8tb ssd for the speed/space
but now i read how wow and other games like eve online are unplayable and these graphics gpu only will give about 5-10 fps performance at all times.
This is terrible but im hoping others have some tweaks so these mac studio can actually be used?
far as I’ve seen they only have issues with game porting toolkit, and well wine in general. Where performance is really low cause wine or D3DMetal (no idea hwere fault is) doesn’t know how to schedule to two diff Max chips interconnected. But games like wow shoud not be running that bad at all, you’re doing something wrong. I’d check if the cpu/gpu is maxed out by other tasks, maybe spotlight or time machine backup was running when you tested. Or app store updates, if xcode was installing that’d max out most of cpu cores while it was updating.
btw i still stand by what I said in other thread, buying one of these now is terrible timing, apple is expected to announce the M3 versions next month and m3 is a much bigger leap than m2 was over m1. it’s not a tiny leap. M3 ultra is going to utterly stomp M2 ultra with way more cpu cores, and all the imrpovements brought to M3 series coming to gpu cores too. count will only go to 80 but it’s the memory management changes, hardware mesh that’ll make a diff. hardware RT is meh so far cause NOTHING uses it yet.
to put into perspective, M3 max, is keeping up with an M2 ultra, on cpu side of things. so a single M3 max = TWO m2 maxes connected together. so imagine what two M3 maxes interconnected will look like. 
So seriously, send it back, til M3 Ultra comes out unless you’re just a rich oil prince 
yes unfortunately many others have told me how unuseable these machines really are just like you. I guess will have to return now that I now apple chip is 100% unuseable for games or most work other than video. what a shame. Maybe Dell has something that actually works.
it’s very usable for games. as long as it’s a native one. don’t know why the ultras are bad at using game porting toolkit though. it’s in part why i’ve just been staying with max chips. my M3 Max plays everything at 4k like it’s nothing. including wow, the new death stranding, and even many games in game porting toolkit. i play diablo 4 at 4k max settings too. FSR and metalfx have come a long way.
as i said though, if you’re getting low fps in wow, you’re doing something seriously wrong. that should be getting even better performance than I am and I play at 4k with 75% render scale and all settings maxed out except compute and liquid since both are too costly right now.
My advice on returning it wasn’t because ultra is bad, but because the current generation one is obsolete, since we know next generation one is due in a few weeks
Might wait until M5 to be fair since odds have the best new features/advances and an M3 now is already obsolete.
The issue could be similar to why apps and even some games on the AMD 7000 series X3D CPUs fail to use the proper CCX and end up on the mainline CCX instead of the X3D specific CCX, resulting in abysmal performance that makes the CPU worse than the non-X3D version. The hardware in the Ultras is absurd on paper, and if the scheduler is even halfway decent should crap all over everything below that tier. Hell, the issue could be something as simple (relatively speaking) as the incorrect set of cores being parked, creating some really wonky I/O latencies.
That’s not an issue with native metal though. GPU cores report as a single gpu, and metal auto handles scheduling. it’s not like dual gpus of old and 3rd party drivers to boot.
Native metal sees a 76 core gpu and that’s it and schedules accordingly. The issue with wine/crossover etc is that there is a layer in front of metal that does in fact run into issues with tasking correctly.
It’s definitely important to be on latest macOS too. I didn’t ask op if they made sure to install macOS 14.3.1. that M2 might have come preloaded on ventura.
I think you will really enjoy WoW on the M2 Ultra Studio. I have the M2 Ultra Studio base version, and it plays retail with all graphic settings at 10, and I stay at 60 FPS. Of course, it runs Classic perfectly with all maxed. I really push the M2 Ultra as much as I can. I have 15 ip cameras streaming to it. I often stream to YouTube at 4K 60fps and do a lot of audio recording and editing. All while playing WoW, and on top of this, I have six monitors five are 4K (one is 1080) all on at once. (The M2 Ultra Studio can support up to 8 monitors.) The M2 Ultra has never once frozen up or forced rebooted in all the time I’ve had it. I had an M1 Mac mini totally maxed out and it would occasionally reboot. But the M2 Ultra never has. If a game is native Apple Silicon, you’ll really enjoy the performance. It stays cool with the copper heat sinks and fans and never once have I heard fans. With all this the CPU usage rarely rises above 25% or so. It’s really hard to push the M2 Ultra Studio to its limits. I highly recommend it.
yeah it’s a decent machine, it’s just not one someone should be buying NOW with M3 ultra literally a month away. buying a product 11 months into it’s 12 month product cycle is poor planning. cause when the new one comes out you can get new one for same price as what the m2 ultra is now, OR get the m2 ultra discounted. so either path makes waiting smarter. That’s why I encouraged user who JUST bought it to send it back while they can to get most value for such an expensive purchase.
very diff than you who probably bought it many months ago.
That is true, and excellent advice. I honestly did not read the entire thread, but was just responding to his initial query. I definitely would wait at this point as the M3 will do all I mentioned and far more. And yes, I’ve had mine for many months. Truly, the best computer I’ve ever used.
Are these trolling comments, or from people who are amazingly influenced by some kind of AI troll service?
The M<1 or 2> Ultra Studio machines are all phenomenal at WoW compared with any Mac before them. I say this from experience with an M2 Ultra with “only” 60 graphics cores and 128 Gbyte of memory. And “only” 2 Tbyte of internal Flash storage (calling it an SSD implies that it’s some kind of standards-based hardware that it’s really not; Apple likes to roll its own stuff).
Curious whether you have some kind of insider knowledge about Apple’s product introduction schedule. The M1 was introduced in 2022 March, and the M2 in 2023 June. Absent such inside knowledge, seems like you could flip a coin between March and June or any month in between for this year’s model. Or maybe later if Apple wants to bake more Apple Large Language Model AI inside.
No idea heh, the only issue with apple silicon macs now seems to be trying to do the fresh install on new machine/os and needing a copy of the indices from a working install. This is hot garbage from a user experience point of view but not insurmountable.
An M1 Max with 24 gpu cores is running this just fine and seemingly better than my older pc with a nvidia GTX1080 which is all I ever need so no complaints. Do not play many other games other than EVE online so mac works for me and is what we use at work too.
I have the M1 base Ultra.
It’s great.
I can imagine people who write about WoW doing 5-10 FPS are speculating, or have somehow reconfigured the game to run as obnoxiously inefficiently as possible. o.O
I have actual numbers – Mac Studio 4k benchmarks (or: Is it fast?)
I run in a window on a 4k monitor with a rendering scale of 83%, compute set low, shadows set to ultra, MSAA set moderately, and everything else maxed out. I run keys, I raid, there is definite slowdown if I’m doing a Bloom with 39 other people but even then, it’s still playable.
Edit: Host not currently loading, check again later. ;p
I follow all the reliable sources. Apple is rumored to have it’s next mac event next month.
My M2 Max laptop at graphics level 10 gets 80-120 FPS typically.
Depends on area for certain, but yeah more often than not any areas with fps drops are due to poor cpu usage of wows dated engine, and not gpu on my M3 Max 40 core. with exception of compute shaders and liquid higher than good, will cause gpu bound fps drops in certain areas at higher resolutions/render scale. since I choose 4k output at 75% render scale, I set liquid to good and compute off to stay solid 60fps in emerald dream, otherwise massive fps drops near water or near the compute shader fog near where fyrak flies in circles.
liquid making a huge hit when near 4k is actually cause their screen space reflection code is from cataclysm and very dated and inefficient, it basically mirrors the entire frame so it doubles the performance cost and at higher pixel counts, is exponentially more demanding. IE the water reflections are 4x demanding at 4k than they are at 1080p. Newer games tend to optimize this by sampling the screen space reflection at a lower resolution than the render target, plus other tricks to not have screen space reflections be costly, but those are things they likely didn’t consider in cataclysm when people wouldn’t even consider playing above 1080p. This doesn’t even count that the way they mirror it is also not ideal for tile based gpu renderers
BTW this isn’t self promo by any means but just to show that My M3 Max can not only raid at solid 60fps at a 4k render target, but encode/stream at same time without breaking a sweat, and i specifically link nymue progress just because the fight is known for massive frame drops and performance issues on lower end machines. I also always play with metal performance hud on so you can literally see the performance benchmark in live action.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2064007468?t=02h42m23s
Video quality not withstanding, that’s a twitch issue, 6k bitrate at even 1080p/60 is limited with that much visual noise, it’s getting boxy because twitch doesn’t support higher quality codecs or bitrates. (also make sure to copy the time stamp to nymue part of it)
I use an M2 mac studio max and it runs WoW perfectly at 10/10 graphics and 4k resolution. Don’t see why an ultra would suddenly cause problems.
It wouldn’t, not with wow anyways, only thing ultras run bad in is wine+gptk, so why OP has problems is an OP issue.
Maybe he just got a lemon. Could be as simple as that.