Has Blizzard commented on this? Do they still comment on stuff?
This doesnât apply to AMD, because AMD shares its driver source with Apple, which Apple then customizes + tunes and bundles with macOS itself, thus making them Apple kexts instead of custom kexts.
The reason itâs a pickle for Nvidia is because theyâre just as controlling and secretive as Apple and wonât agree to a similar arrangement.
There is also the substrate separation bad blood from a few macbook pros back. NVidia refusing to acknowledge the issue and share the load didnât sit well with Apple.
Iâve read this thread and Iâd like to make a few points that I donât think were adequately covered.
- A few days ago Activision Blizzard COO Daniel Alegre said âWe need to make sure that weâre enabling our franchises on the billions of mobile devices that are available right now. Thatâs by far our biggest opportunity, and weâre investing meaningfully to capitalize on this and to take all our franchises to mobile over time. Thatâs really, really important for us.â
- Itâs not clear what Alegre meant by âmobileâ but thereâs a good chance it applies to Appleâs mobile OSs which includes iPad OS (something Warcraft could run just fine on) and may include Apple Silicon MacOS since this new platform is binary compatible with mobile iOS and iPadOS.
- Blizzard converted its graphics in 2016 for its Mac Wow Client to run with Metal instead of OpenGL so Blizzard has shown an interest in getting efficient versions of Wow on MacOS.
- Blizzard hasnât commented on this whole issue yet. I donât think they are ignorant of events at all. They are probably watching intently. They probably even have a working version of WoW running on the Apple Silicon DTK that came out a few months ago, although that doesnât mean they will release it.
- We donât know if WoW will run on Rosetta 2 under Apple Silicon.
Hereâs my opinion based on the facts above: Blizzard probably has a plan. Since they are completely silent itâs probably not bad news. My guess (coloured by my hope) is that they will announce support for both Apple Silicon Macs and iPadOS at the same time. I think Blizzcon 2021 is in February. Can they wait that long to announce it?
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Just chiming in here. In the Past Blizzard have stated that as long as a model of Mac is officially supported by Apple World of Warcraft should be able to run on it barring any system requirements they might have.
So Iâm going to assume it will be supported given system requirements are generally a minimum required to run the game situation and these macs have only just come out.
In saying that I have asked on the MVP Discord on that and will keep you guys posted.
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You make me happy, thanks. Iâm giving you a virtual hug here: (). See if you can find out if that support will be through emulation or native compiling to Apple Silicon.
To add to the discussion (in case arenât following the thread in General forums)
Iâm confident you guys will be able to run Wow on your new macs.
I was here when support was the ability to run wow on PPC macs was withdrawn. This was done primarily because of the difficulty in sourcing test units for Mac based QA as well as getting support from Apple for outdated hardware. If you canât get appropriate hardware to test bugs on or get appropriate support from Apple with a bug that has to do with outdated hardware and/or software it makes it very hard to code workarounds to mitigate bugs.
In this case it wonât be the case - while Apple have a tendency to play hot potato with their old hardware/software thatâs only about 1-2 years old they will always support the latest and most recent things they have come out with. Blizzard will have no trouble with sourcing test units nor getting support on bugs. In fact Apple will probably be begging them to file bug reports given how new the hardware is
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In fact guys ⌠if anyone gets one of the new ARM macs before the Mac team have posted about it âŚ
Can you try running wow and let us know how you go ?
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I ordered it as soon as it went up for sale, but delivery is âNov 25-27â. Typically I get Apple deliveries before the delivery date. The first thing I will do is try to install WoW. Of course, youâre talking about trying to run it in Rosetta 2 emulation. My hope is that Blizzard will create a native/universal binary for it.
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Your metaphor is accurate in once sense, the Mx chips wonât generate anywhere near the heat an x86 chip of equal processing power will.
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One of the core competencies Apple bought with Next in the last century was porting and emulation expertise. Next had NextStep running on multiple architectures back in the mid-90s, and when those engineers moved to Apple they had OS X running on Intel chips in the lab LONG before Apple officially switched over. I have great confidence Rosetta2 will be extremely efficient and effective.
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running and running efficiently are two different things. i think the fact they dont even mention what processor it competes with exactly is very telling just what kind of performance to expect from these processors.
im guessing low end i3 at best so even if blizzard ports the game over it will run like crap anyway.
Looking at the CPU they are comparing with which is by and large a 2016 Core i3⌠Iâd guess this probably aims for 2018-2020 Core i5 territory. I think multithreaded perf will vastly exceed that though as it literally has four more cores. If weâre lucky this will draw even with a Ryzen Mobile 4700G which was 8c/16t, it also has a similar 10-25W TDP (OEM configurable). But we need to wait for benchmarks.
Itâs also worth noting that Appleâs comparison metrics (6x perf on the GPU) are kinda useless and donât mean much. 6x what? for example. Direct time comparisons would be a better example. Unfortunately Apple seems to be avoiding such at all costs.
I donât expect that to happen with macOS for Apple Silicon. The new Air and Pro do not support eGPUs, so I imagine the drivers arenât there. I imagine someone getting one of these will plug an eGPU in just to see what happens.
Note: it has since been confirmed that none of the M1 machines will not support eGPUs. Apple may bring it back for next gen but not this one.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/10/apple-silicon-m1-macs-do-not-support-egpus/
I generally agree with you,. However,
- They havenât fixed a long-standing bug where the Battle.net app constantly updates on macOS
- Overwatch and Diablo 4 do not have Mac versions.
I am also curious if WoW will even launch. I use a data analysis tool, Tableau, and they have flat out said the current version of Tableau wonât even launch on Apple Silicon. I expect Apple claims of how well Rosetta 2 etc work are for App Store apps, and not so much the rest of them.
I am hopeful that Blizzard will release an Apple Silicon version, mainly because I donât want to have to buy a gaming PC to play WoW in the future,.
IIRC WoW doesnât use AVX, but I canât actually confirm that as the system requirements are for CPUs with AVX (the AMD FX-8300 doesnât support AVX2) both on PC and Mac. That would in theory be the only reason it wouldnât run via Rosetta. However JIT is not native and will perform differently than hardware. A native build would always be best. Honestly I donât know.
I know that a friend that works for a AAA dev said they had little interest at this time in looking at Apple Silicon at least for the first generation or two unless Apple paid them (this is stupid common in industry btw, a vendor will pay a game dev to use X or Y new flashy feature). This is mostly because:
- There wonât be enough market penetration to matter
- The first gen silicon will likely have quirks and issues that wonât exist in second or third gen. Spending time working around those issues is wasted if there arenât enough people using it yet.
- It complicates Quality Engineering and adds new rows to the testing matrix, this is expensive and not worth doing for less than 1% of the market. This is why they generally donât support linux either. If Apple covered that cost theyâd be more interested.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/about_the_rosetta_translation_environment
I think you are right, especially on your AAA list. I am hopeful Blizzard will support it, but also not optimistic.
I am very excited about Apple silicon though.
Apple is an odd one, they have paid iOS devs to make the jump before on things. Itâs not inconceivable they could pay Blizz. But I donât see it at this point just because of the target usage of this round of machines. Maybe when the more powerful iMacs ship perhaps? But if anything I suspect Apple would want to hide behind Rosetta 2 for this first round as a way to dismiss performance concerns. That way they can blame Blizz for any performance issues by saying âWell if they want the best they should compile for Apple Siliconâ.
Honestly I expect Apple will likely pay iOS game devs first and wait on AAA games until later in the cycle.
There is a difference between play and play natively. I have little doubt WoW will play on he new mac using the Rosetta2 emulation system. I think the question people are wanting to know is will blizzard redo the code to work on the new ARM M1 chip natively.
When Apple went from PPC to intel WoW was coded for the PPC, and it ran on intel macs using Rosetta to emulate PPC code. Later on Blizzard redid the code to work natively on intel macs.
The question is will they do that again. If not this game might die a slow death on for Macs.