Don’t know who you talked to, but wow literally added support to it to 9.0.2 on beta yesterday. Don’t believe me, install either PTR or beta, then do lipo -archs pathtowowbinary
It’s not supported on LIVE yet, but 9.0.2 is going to go live in probably days, not weeks.
https://youtu.be/2lK0ySxQyrs?t=1503 - Yes! Jump to 25:20 WoW will work on M1 macs!
They re talking about rosetta 2, which works fine too (and what you need with classic and retail 9.0.1. But not even they knew how far ahead blizz was with supporting NATIVE M1 on 9.0.2, which again is better than even what that video says.
It may be some time before classic gets native M1 though, but it’ll run fine in rosetta 2 mode
There’s an ARM64 build string from July, so they’ve had this in the pipeline for at least half a year. I’m happy but surprised that it’s being pushed out for Shadowlands’ release.
May be sooner than later since the classic client is built around the modern client’s architecture. How much, I don’t personally know, but since it’s all modern software architecture, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t cross over between the clients.
it’s actually not. it’s built around 8.1.5, and missing a LOT of things arm needs that were in 9.0 and later. When classic forked from retail code, it was already gosh a good 2 years ago, and it’s been in stasis since while retail code/engine moved forward. So unless moving to classic to 9.0 code base is around corner, it may be a while before classic has arm support.
But as I said that doesn’t mean it won’t run, it’ll run fine in rosetta and probably still have better performance than retail mainly because classic is far less demanding (it’s old areas with lower rez textures)
8.1.5 is still compatible with Metal, isn’t it? I don’t know how their modern engine is constructed, but for all we know, the backend graphic modules (for instance) are still the same between clients. Even if much of the front facing architecture is based on an older version.
Purely speculation, but it seems hard to say. And please correct me it I’m wrong, I’m genuinely excited for all of it to be M1 compatible.
Well, that’s even better than I had hoped. Thanks for the update here!
All the news here is so great it’s stunning. It’s big enough news for a major announcement, but Blizz hasn’t said a word. Maybe that’s because this isn’t the whole story. Maybe it’s not only WoW that Blizzard has converted to M1, but other programs as well. Maybe Diablo III? Hearthstone? Maybe all their Mac programs? Maybe Blizz is saving this for one big announcement, and that would probably be Blizzcon 2021 in Feb (just a guess.)
Indeed, it could be even bigger if these same programs also could run on iPad Pro with a mouse and keyboard. However I’m not sure if that’s possible because macOS is a superset of iPadOS.
I think this is possible. All of the games you mentioned use Metal, and at the very least, Metal helps with Rosetta 2 since it uses Apple’s native graphics API. Metal seems like half the battle for creating a universal binary, so we may see native versions of Diablo 3, Hearthstone, Starcraft 2, and even Heroes of the Storm.
Some GFXBench scores have been posted. It’s not clear to me which machine this is (I would assume they’d get different scores due to different cooling/power restrictions).
I can’t seem to post this link, but if you google “gfxbench Apple M1” they’ll come up.
problem is that site only lets you compare it to hardware up to 2017, they seem to have no macs after that.
I’m running GFXbench on my own machine right now (2018 Mac Mini i7, running tests both with and without the eGPU). I’ll post links on Twitter (@Lhivera) when I’m done, since I can’t seem to post them here.
Posted links/screenshots to Twitter. For the most part, the M1’s results seem to fall within tens of frames on either side of my eGPU (Radeon RX 560), with one notable exception: on texturing, the Radeon is getting 25,610 MTexels/s, while the M1 is getting (checks notes) 71,700 MTexels/s.
I don’t know how important that is for our needs.
“It works great” under Rosetta 2…
But has WoW worked “great” on any Mac over the years?
Still really know nothing yet. Couple of weeks will tell… assuming those who actually buy one post in the forums.
quite a few actually. There are some problem spots but they are almost exclusively in the…intel drivers… see where this is going?
The biggest issue with apple is when something is out the door it’s not slow it’s immediately. So now it’s clear why apple gave crap all about fixing intel drivers, or even AMD drivers for that matter. Because they’re obviously getting rid of both of them anyways. does it kind of screw over old macs, yeah. But that’s always been apples design strategy. Abandoning it’s old users in favor of new, always. They been doing this for years when they switched to yearly hardware AND software cycles.
Great in comparison to what? Other Macs? Over the years it has been pretty evident that WoW performed better under Windows than it did on a Mac… and I’m talking on the very same hardware.
New machine comes out… does better than the previous machine… but still has it’s shortcomings when compared to the PC on equivalent hardware.
It has played acceptable over the years because most Mac users are used to playing games at that level. Anything new is bound to be better… because it’s new. But is it great?
Great would be running it at max settings in any setting (RAID or otherwise). I haven’t seen a Mac run WoW great.
I’d like to see one run great, not in comparison to a lesser machine, but in comparison to an equivalent or better machine.
To post a linke as TL2 or below, encase them in Grave acceents (`) like this: `https://www.apple.com`.
Thanks, Tia. I spent so long off the forums…stuff changed!
So, this is a 2018 i7 Mac Mini. Where an eGPU was used, it’s the Radeon RX 560.
Geekbench 5
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4743678
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/1836172
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/1836183
GFXBench apparently doesn’t permit linking results (folks are getting a “you can only view your own results” message…maybe because I’m using the free version, I dunno), so these links display screenshots of the two tests:
https://twitter.com/Lhivera/status/1328054902682050561/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Lhivera/status/1328054902682050561/photo/2
And here’s an M1 MacBook Pro: https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=OS%20X&api=metal&D=Apple+M1&testgroup=overall
My 16" MacBook Pro (with 5500) runs WoW just as well on macOS as it does on Windows.
Back in the OpenGL days it got quite bad, but since their Metal backend matured there has been no point in booting into Windows for WoW (unless you’re using intel graphics).
This varies quite a bit depending on hardware. On the past two AMD Macs I’ve played WoW on (hackintosh w/5700XT and now iMac Pro w/Vega 56) the performance difference has been negligible. Actually, in my testing the iMac Pro runs WoW a bit worse under Windows than it does under macOS, and that’s even running the latest, most up-to-date drivers from AMD instead of the ancient apple-supplied boot camp drivers.