Coming from a 2017 13’ MacBook Pro, which struggled to keep up 24 fps at Elysian Hold on the lowest settings, I’ve found performance on my new Mac Mini M1 to be outstanding. It feels like I’m playing a different game.
Couldn’t be more thankful for Blizzard’s native M1 support.
I’m playing at graphics setting 8, with the shadows turned all the way down on a good auld 1080p screen connected through HDMI.
Performance is great. I get 60 fps is most places I’ve been in this weekend. This includes Oribos, Bastion, Ardenweald and some dungeons.
However, I’ve noticed something a bit strange. Whenever my system cannot push 60 fps, the frames drop straight to 30 fps. No in-between. It creates a bit of an uneven experience if I’m honest. I would like the frames to stay true to what the machine can push at a given situation.
I would move my character away from, say, a dense area, and the frames would go back up to 60 per second.
This is a 60Hz screen so I don’t care about pushing more frames than the ones I need.
This is a fresh WoW install, on a brand new Mac Mini M1.
No addons installed. I have tried playing around with the settings, including vertical sync but this changes nothing.
Any help or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Has anyone else experience this on their system?
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Thank you for replying!
As I have stated above, toggling vertical sync on or off does not change anything. At least for me.
Sorry, skipped the end there.
Nevertheless, it does very much sound like vertical sync framecapping,does it not? I wonder whether perhaps enabling and then disabling it would change it, or perhaps if the M1 chip simply forces a vertical sync-like behavior.
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It appears the way Metal is handling VSync on the M1 Macs is the old 15/20/30/45/60 FPS thresholds. Basically, if it’s a multiplicand of 10, 15, 20, or 30, that’s where the threshold will land if the current situation allows for it. So a drop from 60 directly to 30 means the system can’t maintain 45 or even 40 FPS either and drops to 30 instead. It’s basically how VSync used to work under the OpenGL API. Hopefully there’s an update from Apple soon that allows for dynamic VSync, which is what Metal does for the Intel Macs.
Of course, if Apple had left open the possibility of using at least an AMD GPU on the ARM Macs, then they could use FreeSync 2 with compatible displays, but that obviously didn’t and likely won’t happen. I suspect we won’t really see true improvement in this area until HDMI 2.1 displays are commonplace and cheap enough to get so that games can just use the VRR portion of the HDMI 2.1 spec to handle FPS limitations.
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To anyone who’s interested, the ARM client has been updated and this is no longer an issue! 
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