Do we know if WoW will run on the new M1 chip?
Does Blizzard plan on supporting this chip in the future?
yes and who knows but probably
1 Like
Wow will run with their rosetta2 software, but will they port all their current software to the new ARM code? That is the big question.
Hopefully they will, as the new M1 chip is actually a graphical upgrade vs the models they are replacing.
1 Like
Do we have any idea of how it runs? Graphically? If it runs well? Or do we still need an Intel based MAC to play?
well, they said up to 6x faster graphics vs the models they were replacing. So it is at least better than before.
Yeah, but that can be compared to an iPad and not the Intel graphics (which suck) but how is the game going to be able to played by Rosetta through a different GPU
I’ll be eagerly watching this thread… I haven’t played in over a year, and actually sold my hackintosh and laptop as I found myself using the iPad Pro for everything I needed to do, BUT, I clicked into a YouTube video and WoW is pulling me back in again. Surprise surprise.
I know I can speak for myself and several other friends in the same boat, we’re all considering getting back into the game with Shadowlands, but we’re also all Mac users.
I would need to purchase a new machine and am extremely curious about support for the new chip.
Blizzard, you’ve always had Macs’ back, don’t let us down now! (Also, diablo 4 please 
)
5 Likes
Hopefully it isn’t 6x0. I am cautiously optimistic, but that hasn’t worked out in the past with Mac gaming.
Pretty please. I’ve been a Mac gamer… please don’t judge… since Orcs Vs Humans.
4 Likes
its a cell phone chip so dont hold your breath of it holding a candle to intel or amd. it wont be x86-x64 either.
We’ll have to wait for real benchmarks, but integrated GPU performance on these things is estimated to be on par with that of a GTX 1060 while sipping a fraction of the power. That’s not exactly powerhouse territory but it’s a good deal better than Intel integrated and should handle WoW on medium settings pretty well. On the CPU front, some benchmarks were leaked last week and if they’re true they’re as good or better than the 16" MBP in single-threaded, so that shouldn’t be too lacking either.
The Shadowlands beta contains references to an ARM build so hopefully Blizz already has a working port internally that they’ll make available soon.
3 Likes
Blizzard has been removing their platform commitment of Mac support from their franchises for the last few years starting with Overwatch. There’s always hope they will continue WoW because of the subscriptions but there is a definite trend heading away from the Apple ecosystem.
Rosetta 2 will be fine as long as Blizzard doesn’t drop MacOS entirely in some future MacOS version. Whether M1 or Intel wouldn’t matter at that point.
1 Like
The M1 isn’t a cell phone chip. The A-series chips are for the iPhones and the A_X or A_Z chips are for the iPad Pros. The M1 is a chip engineered for laptops. It will do quite well vs. the Intel and AMD offerings.
9 Likes
i wouldnt hold your breath. qualcom is still years behind intel or amd. unless they had massive gains in the past 2 years their ipc is lower than the core 2 duo’s from 2007
Apple has been designing their own CPUs from scratch for over 5 years at this point. A-Series and M-Series share little in common with Qualcomm CPUs.
2 Likes
fair enough. but are they still based on the ARM arch? because if so wow will never run on them without some sort of software to convert the code.
Yep, Apple CPUs are ARM. Most software will run on ARM CPUs with a simple recompile, ignoring model-specific optimizations.
macOS Big Sur includes Rosetta 2 for translating x86 binaries to ARM binaries to hold people over until companies release official ARM ports.
1 Like
My questions at this point:
- Pro vs Air. Touch Bar, higher performance (same SoC, but fed more power and cooled), and an extra 3 hours battery life, at the cost of $250 and 0.2 lbs.
- Will an eGPU still work? Is my RX 560 eGPU even going to be an improvement over the M1’s GPU?
games that rely on x86-x64 instruction sets require extensive recoding to convert. its not as simple as recompiling the code.
I wasn’t planning on commenting originally but context here. Apple is comparing thus:
Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction Mac mini systems with Apple M1 chip, and production 3.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i3-based Mac mini systems with Intel Iris UHD Graphics 630, all configured with 16GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a complex 2-minute project with a variety of media up to 4K resolution. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac mini.
So a few things to unpack there:
- Intel Iris UHD Graphics 630: This wasn’t fast even back then (2016)… it’s a 23 Execution Unit and 184 Shading Unit GPU with a base clock of 350MHz and a boost clock of 1100 – 1150MHz on a 14nm process… so getting six times better than this… Intel probably did a year or two ago.
- Final cut is not games, let’s be clear. This is a productivity GPU and that means it’s focused on making specific workloads faster. We’ll see how that translates into actual games. My guess is probably 2-4x. But as usual… hardware and testing will tell.
- Unified memory architecture: Be forewarned… Apple didn’t say they were using GDDR… so that means this is probably DDR4 or if everybody is lucky… DDR5, clocked at JEDEC speeds. This will honestly likely be the main GPU bottleneck like it is for almost all iGPUs.
Overall thoughts: The GPU will probably do better than 6x for workloads that are small enough to fit in the GPUs own caches, and are predictable enough for it’s prefetcher so it doesn’t kill memory bandwidth. But I highly doubt the GTX 1060 number, even with the increased transistor density of 5nm… the chip is just physically too small and there is not enough die area for that kind of power. GT1050 maybe though.