How’s WoW gonna handle the new processors? I’m only curious because this popped up: https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/59187
ESO will not be ported to the new architecture and suggests Stadia. Emulation is possible, but they expect a performance hit.
Will it have to run on an emulation with WoW or do you expect Blizzard to port the software entirely?
WoW is getting day one Apple Silicon support.
These first few M1 Macs, which are all “entry level”, should run WoW about as well as a machine equipped with an RX 560 or GTX 1050 Ti and a current-gen mobile CPU. Not exactly gaming powerhouses, but pretty respectable for systems with 10-15W SoCs, total power footprints of 20-30W, and battery life of 10h-20h (depending on load). The Air and 13" MBP should make pretty decent WoW ultraportables.
I’m very interested to see what the upcoming “performance” models — 16" MBP, iMac (Pro), and Mac Pro — are capable of.
Yeah I hadn’t been on GD so I missed that announcement.
I don’t run Mac but I thought about it as soon as I saw ZeniMax isn’t supporting it.
It surprising that Zenimax isn’t, because by all appearances the transition isn’t difficult. Furthermore, I think this is a change of winds sort of thing… they’re going to look silly in a few years when ARM-based Windows laptops are common and their games won’t run without emulation.
Dunno, really. I guess they crunched the numbers and determined mac is too small a share.
I want to say their biggest audience is the console market. It will run on the next gen consoles.
It’s a new CPU arch for Apple’s laptops, so we won’t know until we see gaming reviews. Really impressive so far with the benchmarks I’ve seen, but it also took AMD like 3 years to match or beat Intel in gaming. So don’t be surprised if it takes Apple a few years to catch up.
One differing factor though is that the architecture in the M-series chips is very similar to that of the preceding A-series chips in iPhones and iPads, meaning it’s not a true first generation product. As a result, it might not take as long for Apple to achieve what AMD did.
Personally I’m expecting the first generation M-series iMacs and Mac Pro’s to at least trade blows with Intel/AMD, given the dramatically higher power budget and cooling capacity of those machines.
The one thing about these new M1 SoC’s that interests me the most, is if they can stick it into iPads and bring the tablet market back from the dead.
That would be really impressive, an iPad with laptop functionality when docked, on 5nm so battery life isn’t compromised.
The usual overexaggerating the performance. Intel and AMD still stomps it.
In the article you linked, M1 is trading blows with Intel in single core (“thrashed”, as worded in the article, is hyperbolistic). Ryzen beats M1 in multicore yes, but it’s also got the advantage of 8 big cores, vs. M1’s 4 big 4 small arrangement.
And the article doesn’t mention performance per watt at all, which is the bigger story. You’re definitely not squeezing 20 hours of battery life out of an Intel chip without under clocking it, and while AMD would likely get closer (I’ve seen Ryzen laptops get into the ~15h range with a big battery), M1 is the clear winner on that front.
Given that these are entry level, portability focused devices trading off a bit of performance for a lot of battery life and less heat is the right call.
Depends on how you gonna use your laptop. You can throw away battery life if you gonna do certain heavy workload.
Also, AMD Zen 3 laptop is going to be another monster.
If you’re doing heavy workloads frequently enough for it to influence your choice of laptop, you’re probably buying something more powerful than a MacBook Air or low-end 13" MBP. In apple-land that’s probably a 16" MBP, which currently range from i7-9750H to i9-9980HK and would presumably be replaced with analogous M-series CPUs.
I won’t dispute that Zen 3 mobile is going to be monstrous though. Intel is just getting spanked on multiple fronts.
That is really interesting.
Since iOS apps run on Mac with M1 chips, maybe this means “technically” WoW is compatible with iOS devices.
I’m an iOS app dev by trade and macOS dev as a hobbyist, and yeah this is true. From a technical perspective, if it works with one it generally works with the other, particularly for things like WoW that make zero or near-zero usage of native UI.
Obviously I have little actual insight into the inner workings of WoW, but if I had to guess, probably the biggest hurdles to deal with in getting WoW to run on an iPad would involve deal with iOS’ heavily sandboxed nature. On Macs, WoW (and Blizzard’s anti-hack agent Warden) have practically free rein to do as they please but on iOS apps are cordoned off from one another and the system, and so those bits would need adjustment.
Apple is such a ripoff. I was on their site the other day customizing a Mac Pro for fun, and they charge $550 to upgrade from a Vega 56 to a 64. 
I guess this is why people are so interested in hackintoshes.
Maybe that seems a little generous? I saw a WoW M1 FPS video on YouTube yesterday and they were getting I think low 40 fps at max settings with no aliasing at 1280P(edit: resolution fixed) on the new starting ship. I went there on my GT 1030 and with the same settings, I got about 57 FPS at 1080p. The starting ship seems to be a little generous, since I went to Stormwind right after with max settings and was getting about 15 FPS lol.
There are some videos that were taken before the native ARM binary was released, maybe you saw one of those?
Either way, my estimate was based on benchmarks that showed roughly RX 650/GTX 1050 levels of performance.
It was this one, the video came out on the 17th.
Was this before or after the update came out?