MacBook Help

Community General Discussion
#1

DON’T CARE ABOUT TROLLY STUFF OR PC RECOMMENDATIONS…I KNOW PEOPLE RECOMMEND TO NOT USE MAC. I WANT GENUINE HELP ONLY.

I am looking to change my portable gaming setup to a new MacBook Air 2020 with the following specs:
I am also getting it for online school and coding/programming but want to be able to play WoW on it as well within reason.

-Apple M1 chip w/8-core GPU
-16 core neural engine
-16GB unified memory
-256GB SSD

WoW is about the only game I make time for anymore so I don’t really need much storage space I just want to make sure the processor and RAM are solid enough to run it good enough.

#2

The processor is kind of a big question, since I’m not sure if WoW will be natively compiled for ARM, or if it will use Rosetta 2 (which is going to have a performance impact over native compilation).

Also, not sure about how good the GPU will be for WoW. I have the 16-inch MBP with a discrete AMD GPU and I can only play on a 5. The M1 is basically a mobile processor, so it may or may not struggle with a beefy desktop game, although Apple certainly has talked it up.

#3

As of yesterday’s patch, WoW has native support for ARM.

2 Likes
#4

So I take it that is a really good thing then? I am just now doing computer coding and programming classes and stuff so I am still fairly clueless to specs and such.

#5

Yes. Native support means the software can utilize the hardware directly. If you don’t have it, you need an emulator which is basically a translator between the software and the hardware. That makes things run significantly less efficiently.

1 Like
#6

The hard drive may be a bit small for what you want to do but other than that, I’m not sure. It suspect it would do fine but not great.

:cookie:

#7

I played on a Mac for 11 years till this year. The new Macs are going to be the best for WOW so far. But if you want to ask about Macs, trust me, GO TO THE MAC FORUM. You are a troll magnet posting this here. All you are gonna get is slammed.

#8

A video went up today on YouTube with someone running WoW (the latest release that supports the ARM chip natively) on the M1 MacBook Air. He’s got the graphics settings maxed and is getting 60 fps. So, yes, it’ll be fine.

But I agree with Grumbles that that’s not a lot of storage. My WoW installation (macOS) takes up over 74GB — so that’s nearly a third of the disk space on a 256GB device. But I’m sure you know your needs better than anyone.