so i have been wanting to get a iMac bigger screen and i feel better overall than a laptop.
how does wow work on M1 chip?
hear are my current spec
2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 4 GB
and hear are the spec of the new iMac i am looking at
- Apple M1 chip with 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, 8-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine
- 16GB unified memory
- 1TB SSD storage
my main question is, will wow run better on the iMac over my MBP, or should I just stick with my MBP?
would getting the new imac be a downgraded?
I have the same MacBook Pro w/ the 5500m + 4GB. If you can, hold out just a bit longer to see what you think of the new 14" and 16" that should hit the market soon – they’ll probably also release a 27" iMac later this year or early next year as well.
In GeekBench Metal GPU benchmarks, the M1 scores ~20400 and the 5500M scores ~29736. In other words, your 5500M is about 45% more powerful than the M1.
If you’re exclusively playing Classic WoW, I think you will have a good experience at native resolution on the M1 iMac (or other M1-variant). Personally, I’ve hooked an M1 MBA to a 4K display to test WoW to see if I should switch – while Classic can maintain 60FPS with low-to-medium settings even in crowded environments at native resolution, Retail WoW, as you’d expect, struggles quite a bit.
For my normal Retail WoW gaming, I use an eGPU with a 5700XT Red Devil (~68000 score) and that is still pretty hard pressed to maintain 60FPS at 4K with high settings – I think I’m running around a Setting 6 with a few things disabled in order to maintain a stable 60FPS.
so one of the biggest issues is that I am really wanting to just switch to a desktop as i am just kinda over a laptop as i don’t do anything with my laptop now, but from what i am understanding your telling me to hold off as the M1 mac are just not strong enough to play retail wow like my current macbook is at the same lev? my spec right now are at high with resolution sitting at 1536x960 shadow,liquid and sunshafts at low and 7 view distant 7 environments and 7 ground.
I was in the same situation as you, so I opt’d for the eGPU route.
I am actually trying to grab a 6800XT when they’re back around MSRP. The 6800XT scores ~152021 in the same GeekBench tests. More than 2.2x faster than the 5700XT – perfect for 4K gaming on high settings.
Or I might go with the M1X/M2 in the 14"/16" if they’re powerful enough (at least as powerful as the 5700XT). We shall see!
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Here’s the deal. If you are buying a new Mac to have better performance in WoW, I say wait.
Reason? The system overhead of WoW now is NOT what it is going to be for the next expansion. If this were the very beginning of the expansion, a new computer makes sense, but at the near to tail end of it, not a good time.
You don’t know what extra bells and whistles will be added to slow your machine down (every expansion slows your machine down).
In addition, while there is an ARM compliant version of retail, the launcher (BattleNet) and Classic are still using Rosetta2. We don’t know if TBC will be ARM compliant. My guess is if they can do TBC ARM compliant, Classic would be as well.
Next, and perhaps the most important, there are issues with FPS on all Macs at the moment. M1 Macs seem to have the most issues.
So since Apple will be releasing new computers all year long, it would behoove you to just wait until the next expansion is due to drop and then buy a new computer IF playing WoW is your primary driving force.
By then, all versions of WoW should be ARM compliant (native), the launcher, and hopefully Apple will have fixed the bugs.
We do know, actually.
Whether or not standard Classic comes along depends on if they rebase its client on Shadowlands, as TBC’s client was.
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