I have serious concerns whether WoW will continue to support the Mac. I can see Blizz not supporting it going forward due to engine updates. I’ll leave my opinions re: Bobby Kotick for a more appropriate venue.
I’m also curious based on Nvidia GTX sponsorship of Blizzcon. Might that be a part of some future detente?
Mostly I just want to get more return on my relatively new to me Mac Pro 5,1 and since I only play D3 and WoW, I’m pretty concerned about the future of the Mac going forward
There’s nothing to be concerned about.
They’ve already announced, and posted the system requirements for macOS. You have nothing to be worried about there.
WoW is running natively on Metal, unlike every other ‘AAA’ MMO that have Mac versions. They went through a lot of trouble to do that - I honestly wouldn’t worry about them dropping support for us any time soon for WoW.
Not sure what you mean with the Nvidia GTX sponsorship bit.
OP has good reason to be concerned about the future of WoW on Mac. First Overwatch and now Diablo IV were not made available for us. WoW tech support issues related to the Mac are largely ignored as of late. Don’t fool yourself, Blizzard is gradually dumping Mac support all around.
In the Chiron during the opening ceremony, there were sponsors including Facebook gaming, Mountain Dew and Nvidia using the Nvidia GTX 280 logo (I might have the wrong number).
I didn’t see an equivalent AMD sponsorship.
It’s probably grasping at straws, but would be nice if we actually got fully updated Mac drivers
I wouldn’t hold my breath. Apple (probably) wants to ship the drivers with the OS since they’re discouraging third-party kernel extensions, but that won’t happen as long as Nvidia refuses to address their driver quality problems.
It’s also likely that there’s a disagreement between the two companies on using different drivers for different brands of the same silicon – Nvidia’s GeForce and Quadro cards are mostly the same hardware with performance and stability differences coming from differentiated drivers (consumer drivers are more buggy and don’t perform as well). Back when Apple still shipped Nvidia drivers with macOS, those drivers didn’t differentiate between GeForce/Quadro and that’s a problem for Nvidia because they charge a lot more for Quadro cards.
Also probably doesn’t help that Nvidia burned Apple with defective MacBook graphics cards that forced Apple to recall and repair countless MacBooks not just once but twice.
nVidia has working drivers. But they can’t release them to the public without Apple notarizing (signing) them. Doing so would cause any app using library validation to show corrupt, garbled, or scrambled text and/or images. nVidia’s latest CUDA release for OS X actually shows they have working drivers at the ready - the CUDA release has entries for the 418 driver branch, which is where support for the Turing (2xxx) series cards starts.
It’s Apple that wants full control and nVidia won’t give them that. Apple wants to bury support for the GPUs that are keeping those older Mac Pros alive. Don’t believe me? Apple went so far as to remove the component in OS X that controls multi-CPU usage just to keep those Mac Pros from working with Catalina. It isn’t an instruction set that’s missing this time, it’s Apple flat out removing the ability to use those machines on purpose.
Except they aren’t the same hardware. Quadro cards have enhanced FP32 performance (usually 8-16x that of GeForce cards), and sport ECC VRAM, which is essential in mission critical and medical rendering. The rendering pipeline in Quadro cards is different than that in GeForce cards, with the former configured for accuracy, not speed.
Apple still ships nVidia drivers with the OS, by the way. They just haven’t updated them in forever because doing so would then support the PCIe GPUs they desparately want out of the picture.
AMD’s faulty GPUs (4870 and 67xx series for iMac) say hello. Apple had to recall those machines too. So that argument doesn’t hold up. Bad batches can happen to any vendor. The difference with the AMD side is that they were installed using MXM cards, which would be relatively easily replaced once the machine was opened up.
In case you haven’t noticed, nVidia has hardware that is clearly superior to AMD. So why isn’t Apple offering that hardware in any Mac model? Why is Apple blocking nVidia from making drivers? Everything Apple is doing points to anti-trust violations left and right, from their blocking of nVidia at every possible point to inclusion of new AMD specific functions in Metal that no nVidia GPU can use. It’s very clear what Apple is doing here.
nVidia wants to support their entire hardware lineup with its drivers. Apple doesn’t want that, even for the new upcoming Mac Pro. That’s collusion. We aren’t getting nVidia updates because Apple doesn’t want us to.
It’s all a damn shame.
I feel like WoW Shadowlands will maybe be on the Mac. I’m feeling a bit more confident about it, but who knows? By this time next year, they may want to baseline 10.14 for WoW (which knocks all of us locked in at 10.13.6 due to our Nvidia cards) and at that point, i’m forced to consider my alternatives…AMD card for my current rig or new Hackintosh rig.
I’ve only had my Mac Pro 5,1 rig since June of 2018 and the idea that it might not last 3 years would be upsetting to me.
Oh well. Once it’s all finalized, I’ll know whether I can pre-order or not and I’ll go from there.
But yeah, I’m not ordering anything until there’s verification that not only the Mac is supported, but specifically 10.13.6… I got this really bad feeling that the next baseline is gonna be 10.14 and all of us Nvidia Mac folks are gonna be aced…
The Mac Pro 5,1 isn’t supported for BFA, it just happens to still be able to run it if you slap a non-stock video card in it that allows for Metal support. Those days are numbered though, as the OS is just as much as a WoW-killer for your rig as the graphics card is. If the system physically can’t run the latest version of OSX, you’re dead under OSX no matter what video card you stick in it.
The Mac Pro 5,1 has been around for nearly a decade now. It lasted far longer than the majority of Mac models out there.
Remember that a lot of folks lost their ability to play WoW when OpenGL was killed. Your machine got a reprieve… it wasn’t given a pardon. It’s days were numbered and that number is rapidly approaching… most everyone agrees BFA is the last expansion these machines will ever run UNDER OSX.
Well, that’s thoroughly depressing because there isn’t a single Apple Mac machine worth a damn after the 5,1 and other than a Hackintosh, nothing that runs Mac OS.
Every single iMac including the iMac Pro is hot garbage and I’ll die on that hill. The laptops are okay and great for what they do, but their lives as gaming machines are very short lived and since all I do are Blizz games and internet apps (disabled vet), the ROI of a machine is super important to me.
The new Mac Pro might be kinda nice, but I’m absolutely not paying new car prices for a computer that Apple is going to force into obsolescence in less than 5 years.
Honestly, I got 10 SOLID years out of my Mac Pro 1,1 and will pass this comp to my youngest who is an artist and will get great use out of it for years to come.
Just seems like Apple has finally and fully migrated from “insanely great” products to “inflated mediocre” products.
Welp. I’ll start planning and saving for a Hackintosh rig because as much as I hate Windows, at least if Apple pulls Hackintosh shenanigans, I can just boot into Windows and move on.
Yep. Thoroughly depressing.
Right, they technically work but that’s not the issue. They work, but their quality is questionable at best. I was running with both a 980Ti and 950 for dual monitors under High Sierra and was constantly getting glitchy graphics on the desktop – not even in WoW or anything actually graphically intense. Random parts of pages in Safari would flicker and display weird extruded patterns, and after rebooting I’d have to log in and out several times just to get WindowManager to initialize in a state where all the elements on the desktop weren’t distorted, shrunken, flickering, or some combination of all three.
That does not sound like a level of quality Apple would be happy to ship anything with. Granted, dual monitors on dual cards is not a terribly common setup, but what other corner cases did Nvidia sweep under the rug?
That’s changed then, because I have a laptop with a Quadro card that is quite happy to run under macOS with GeForce drivers as a 9600GT. In fact I can’t even run Windows on that machine because Nvidia couldn’t ever be arsed to fix a bluescreen bug in the Windows drivers for that card.
Overall I’m saying that while Apple’s attitude in the situation is problematic, Nvidia is not blameless either. They both need to grow up.
Got a link to the specs of that laptop? Because it isn’t an Apple laptop. None of their machines have ever come with Quadro GPUs by default. Those are BTO, and for the Mac Pro only (when they had the old Mac Pros around). You’re not telling the whole story here.
You’re right that it’s not a Mac. It was a Dell Precision M4400 with an Nvidia Quadro FX 770M. Under hackintoshed OS X, its GPU shows up as a 9600M GT and runs with the same drivers as a 9600M GT would and runs great with full acceleration and everything. I still have it on a shelf and for several years I ran it with as a Mac as my day to day workhorse and main WoW machine.
The Quadro FX 770M was essentially a souped up, better binned 9600M GT, as explained by the link.
That also explains the lack of proper dual monitor support. That’s not on Apple nor on nVidia ironically. Those drivers are going off of the vendor ID and device ID. There weren’t separate Quadro drivers for that line back then. nVidia started the web driver branches later.
BTW, I’ve been a beta tester for AMD too (when it was still ATI). Their drivers have had numerous craptacular versions as well, especially the X1900 and X2xxx series. They didn’t start getting really usable until the X3800 came out (that was the final retail AMD card not sold under Apple’s banner, which I beta tested for and still have two of in my desk).
The dual monitor problems were with a 980Ti and 950 with latest webdrivers under HS, not with the Quadro laptop.
And yeah, my brother had a hell of a time with drivers on his R9 390 Nitro under Windows and eventually switched to a 1070Ti. For me though, the combo of 5700 XT + RX 560 has been very solid so far.
If this is in a Mac Pro, it may actually be a power draw issue. Apple didn’t really give users much leeway when it came to multiple GPUs, and the 900 series, despite being more efficient than AMD by leaps and bounds, was still power hungry with the 980Ti cards. Pascal really helped with efficiency there. The 950 was a special snoflake in that it was never fully supported by the drivers as it was based off of the Maxwell 1 architecture vs. the Maxwell 2 that the 960 and higher GPUs used.