Apple announced this week it would sell new Macs “later this year” based on a new CPU currently called “Apple Silicon”. Will WoW run on these Macs in native mode or will WoW at least run in the “Rosetta 2 Intel emulator” or will WoW not run at all? Hopefully this isn’t the end of WoW on Macs. All new Macs will run exclusively on Apple Silicon within two years.
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I’m not sure what their plans are but looking at how overwatch was never released for MacOS, and how WoW stopped support for older hardware that was still capable of running WoW just fine, I’m hard pressed to have faith that thing will continue as normal in the long term.
I’m feeling that most of what we think of has traditional gaming is coming to an end of an era. Windows PCs are in a better position then ever at providing the environment that’s good for gaming. Everything else will just be too much of a pain in the butt.
Really depends on Blizzard. They haven’t gone out of their way to add additional support for other platforms. The new apple CPUs will not be running x86 instructions, which means unless Blizzard specifically redesigns a client for it, which they haven’t done for linux, which already runs x86, it’ll be a no. Furthermore, Apple hasn’t said how software will be pushed. If it’s through the App Store, then Blizzard and Apple will most likely not concede either side and it’ll be a no. I personally don’t see Blizzard putting in the leg work to completely recode the client to work on non x86 platforms, it’d be a lot of effort, for a terrible gaming experience.
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Well you can run Windows programs and games on Linux just fine with some outside help from apps like Wine or crossover. It will depends on if the Mac fan base is willing to write programs to allow it like the Linux fan base does.
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You can only do that with CPUs several times faster and an enhanced instruction set. Apple is specifically going to RISC to make their chips more power efficient, and therefore less powerful. Almost all of the x86 emulation attempts have been absolutely terrible. Apple may have a lot of polish, but you can only do so much with 10-15 watts, and driving a game as large and complex as WoW isn’t really one of them.
I guess that means if you want to be a gamer don’t buy a Mac.
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Pretty much, it’ll be great for battery life and things that were designed with it in mind. There are plenty of games designed for CPUs like that that run great. However, WoW is a very old dog, built specifically with x86 in mind. Contrary to popular belief, it also can be extremely graphically intensive (though a large part of this is unoptimized graphics code cough patch 8.3 cough). While Apple’s new CPUs will undoubtedly be great for battery life, and stuff already on the App Store for iPad OS/iPhones. I don’t see them having a magical way to port stuff over (though I think they actually claimed they did have something to help with that, so we’ll have to see). But it all really comes down to power efficiency. While Intel, AMD, and Nvidia all have low powered chips that will run the game, they are specifically designed for it, and the game is designed for them. And most of them are above 20 watts. You can only do so much with the power budget you allocate for your devices.
If the game developers are optimizing for GPU performance and Apple hardware relies entirely on CPU for graphics, then I can’t see MacOS gaming going anywhere but down the tubes. Sure, there will still be casual gaming but anything that requires real horsepower under the hood just won’t even bother to be ported to macs. I feel that this along with the fact that most of the game we had enjoyed playing that were 32bit that are not completely unplayable now (most of my Steam library), is the end of Mac Gaming.
What sucks the most is that Apple doesn’t care. I don’t really think Blizzard does either.
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The way the macOS development tools work, this shouldn’t be much of an issue, unless they’re doing a LOT of very low level processes. The OS-level APIs are identical for x64 and Apple’s chips. The GPUs, which while embedded are no slouches, use Metal as the API, which the x64 macOS build already uses. You fire up the new Xcode, it asks if you want to also build the app for “Apple Silicon”, and away it goes. You find and fix any low-level items, and you’re done. Maybe a matter of days if you have a bunch.
As to the 32/64bit thing, Xcode from the day they started supported 64bit applications, would do the same: “Do you want to also add 64bit support?” and as Apple had one generation of only 32bit CPUs in the Intel run, this one is on the devs for not saying yes, and spending a couple days fixing their int types to conform to a 64bit world, which they would have to do to support 64bit on Windows anyway.
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Wait until the ARM Macbooks are released and people can confirm how well (or poorly) it runs. Or whether it’s running at all.
I still think it will take a bit of effort from Blizzard to rework their game to run on an ARM processor instead of x86 processors. But I’m not a game developer familiar with what it takes to develop games on ARM and x86 platforms.
Edit: it does seem from the latest Alpha build that Blizzard is at least beginning to make some effort to support ARM systems on MacOS.
Why do you even own an Apple product? You could buy one from 5 years ago, and virtually nothing would be really different, except the price.
Their stuff is, and always has been, super overpriced.
Nothing to do with that “PC Master Race” nonsense, just a fact that it is genuinely not worth owning an Apple product unless you edit videos all day every day.
And even then, there are better products that you can get that are not Apple Exclusive, soooooooooo.
The real question here is “Can you, the OP, validate buying an Apple Computer?”
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That’s more because of Intel’s CPU technology stagnating than anything else. From Skylake until Ice Lake in 2019/2020, Intel couldn’t improve the performance of their CPUs much without using more power and therefore generating more heat. And even the newest Intel 10nm CPUs still have some serious frequency issues.
Windows laptops have had similar issues on the CPU front, since they run off the same Intel CPUs.
I mean…there are other companies that sell CPU’s…like AMD, who is “excreting” all over everybody elses CPU’s right now…and for decent prices.
Just saying, there are other options out there.
AMD didn’t really have competitive mobile CPUs until Zen 2, which I don’t think really started shipping until 2020?
Ryzen is great, but Ryzen laptops weren’t competitive with Intel in 2018 and AMD may as well have not even existed in that space prior to the Zen architecture.
Their CPUs have been competitive for years now, just nobody bought them.
My old pc that I built had an AMD CPU. The AMD Vishera FX-6300. Was helping run all my games on max settings along with my old GTX 980. That was in 2016.
AMD cpus were always in the top 5 sales of cpus, and now they are basically the only good ones you can buy at a decent price for the performance you get out of them.
So again, why even bother with a Mac? They have their purpose, and gaming just is not it.
Currently there is between a 25% and 29% reduction in performance running X86 apps under emulation on the A12Z processor.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/First-A12Z-Bionic-DTK-Geekbench-5-benchmarks-show-Apple-s-transition-holds-immense-promise-only-a-28-in-drop-seen-in-single-core-score-compared-to-the-MacBook-Air-2020.477595.0.html
Considering this is the chip in an iPad Pro with minor modifications, that is pretty good. However, it shows a need for improvement over the two-year transition period as well. I suspect they will end up building additional cores to try and gain performance.
Of course I can justify it. What I can’t justify is buying a second computer, a Windows computer, just to run WoW.
Here’s something most people don’t realize: Blizzard already ported WoW from using OpenGL API to Metal API, which means Blizzard certainly does care about making an effort to run on Macs. Moreover, since it’s already ported to Metal, it’s probably going to be a minor fix (well, nothing is minor) to get it to run on Apple Silicon.
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We use them for work. Also because the last time I purchased a windows laptop for personal use I paid for the super-duper onsite support package that was two hundred bucks a year (if I remember right).
The company messed up the BIOS so the battery would never charge past 70%. After spending almost three hours even trying to get through to a person their response was “oh, we know about that - here is a link to a youtube video to fix it.” I returned the laptop the next day.
The few times I’ve had problems with Apple products, I call them - they answer within a couple minutes and fix it. If it requires a repair they work with me to have FedEx pick it up. Their support is a dream come true.
So, yes, I can validate buying one in more ways than one.
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You are correct. It’s good. Multiple cores are interesting. On Intel, all cores run at the same speed. On Apple Silicon, there are higher speed and lower speed cores. This means apps which are using multiple threads, if they want to run effectively on new Apple Silicon, need to indicate at compile time whether a thread is meant for a high speed or low speed core. This is an example of the kind of thing Blizzard would have to do to make WoW run effectively on Apple Silicon.
Based on feedback on the beta forums, SL won’t run on any mac.