I just wanted to quickly give a shoutout to Blizzard for a job well done with supporting Apple Silicon. I recently switched from a gaming desktop to a MacBook Air M4 for a variety of reasons. When I came back to WoW, I thought I was going to be dealing with terrible frames and low settings.
Imagine my surprise when I’m running at medium to medium-high settings on a 2K ultra wide monitor and getting around 90FPS. On a MacBook Air.
To the team responsible for creating and maintaining the native Mac WoW client: Thank you. I hope you realize just how worth it your efforts are, you’ve done a fantastic job. Not only can I play WoW but it’s a pleasant experience.
I know this is a tech support forum and I don’t mean to clog it up but I definitely felt some recognition was warranted here.
Side note: Anyone have experience with an M4 Max Mac Studio? If a fanless MacBook Air is doing this well, I can only imagine what that beast can do…
I got mine when they first came out, about6 months ago. I have it paired with a 27" 120Hz monitor. It’s great set up and I love it.
My work setup is a Dell XPS with a similar monitor. My opinion when comparing MacOS to Windows is this.
In terms of performance (frame rate and resolution), MacOS is on par with Windows. No complaints. In terms of image quality, I think Windows is the winner here. Lighting effects, shadows, water effects, etc. are better on Windows. I’m not saying MacOS is bad. It’s really good. Especially on the M4 Studio. Windows is just better.
I could definitely see that being a thing. I tend to favor performance and FPS over specifics in graphics, although obviously turning them up high is nice. I don’t know if I notice much difference between my old 3080Ti that I gave my husband and the Mac when I turn the settings both to max though. (Can’t play at max on the MacBook Air, but I can at least look at the slideshow lol)
I am extremely interested in upgrading to a Mac with a little bit more power. Someday… Someday.
I haven’t had any problems like that yet. Here’s to hoping I never do. It has been an adventure getting Razer products to work, but luckily Razer just released their software for macOS again. Although oddly enough I have to have it closed after setting everything up in order for things to work… But that isn’t WoW related directly.
Water/shadows/lighting are identical between macOS/Windows IF using the same settings on both. Although the windows client gets a few extra options with raytraced shadows etc.
Some corrections. there are some things that do not perform as well on windows, purely from a fundemental difference standpoint. water is the biggest one. Good or higher has a much larger performance hit on macOS than windows because the techniques used are not efficient for tile based renderers. In fact many things aren’ efficient for tile based rendering. so macOs does take a performance hit in some areas.
that said, apple silicon does pretty well and cpu performance is pretty good too so they can match many PCs with appropriate specs outside of these specific things.
Really? I have not had any problems that I can directly attribute to macOS 26, although I didn’t play WoW on macOS 25, to be fair.
I am running render scale 75% which is 2580x1080 for my monitor.
One thing I did that helped a lot was turn everything down to minimum settings and then slowly turn things up, prioritizing what I personally prefer. I basically did this until I found the perfect balance.
But that does seem weird to have a drop-off after the OS update… I’m sorry thats happening.
macOS still has two major performance issues to make note of.
the one with regard to key input, while WoW worked around it, MANY applications haven’t, and it affects all applications. you can have another app open in background tanking performance
Electron had another performance issue and there are still many applications not patched to mitigate it yet. Look at https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/ and see if you have any of the unpatched apps running (that would drag performance down)
This is the testing spot I have been using since I started TWW. I used to be able to get 60 here with my current settings. Now it’s down to 45 fps or so and my GPU working over time.
I would say 24GB of ram which by default comes with the M4 pro anyway.
mine has 24GB and I don’t know if I will later regret not having more. only time will tell.
Playing on a Mac Studio M2 Max with a 42" OLED monitor is simply amazing. Thank you, Blizzard. I would also like to thank you for this opportunity
I will never go back to Windows
Also switched from a windows machine months ago using a Mac Mini and can’t bring myself to go back to playing WoW on Windows. I think with the introduction of the Mac Mini it brought a whole new experience to people switching to Mac. I bet internally the WoW devs can see an increase of Apple users as well. There are so annoyances like the constant Bnet updating on Apple vs. Windows, but hopefully as they see more and more people playing on Apple products they will fix this. No complaints though, WoW runs as good or better on my mini. My gratitude to the dev team as well. Keep up the good work.
I feel on Mac Pro mini was hot when playing the WoW game.
I installed the Macs Fan Control software.
My word. it was cool when I set full blast fan blower. Try to get Macs fan control. I am telling you . It’s worth it. (It’s free. )
If a fanless MacBook Air is doing this well, I can only imagine what that beast can do…
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