Hey there I recently installed Sonoma on my MacBook Pro and ever since the game constantly has kernel panics that crash my computer. I have to play on the lowest graphics setting to even be able to play but as soon as I fly anywhere the game crashes. Has anyone else experienced this? I find opening the “force quit” window sometimes gives me a few more min of playtime but it’s definitely not a fix. This only happened with Season of Discovery
2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655 1536 MB
unfortunately this is related to same issue that causes retail not to open. apple hosed the intel iris pro driver in sonoma. you have to roll back to previous OS if you can. it’s only work around. Blizzard is unable to fix this and apple clearly doesn’t care about older mac hardware. you just need to go back to macOS 13 and stay there on that machine. Pretty much all the useful features (like game mode) are exclusive to apple silicon anyways so not missing much. It’s an update that’s designed nearly exclusively on apple silicon (and also clearly only QAed there by apple)
Can you try setting the Graphics API to Metal (Legacy) and see if that changes anything? It sounds like you have a 2018 MBP. It should still have support for that GPU baked into the Kernel. If not, I can maybe find a KEXT file (kernel extension) with the one from Ventura that you can load in terminal with KLDLOAD
Having the same issue
What version of macOS are you using and what Mac hardware are you trying to use it on?
iOS 14.2.1 on a 2020 MacBook Pro.
Can you reliably make it happen? Can you paste the output?
100% chance they’re on Sonoma with an intel Iris gpu. Apple hosed the driver in sonoma. Those macs last worked with macOS 13.x. the day sonoma came out these forums flooded with reports of kernel panics and app crashes. the traces we’ve seen show failures at the driver level.
Blizzard investigated it a bit but ultimately all they could do was pass it onto apple, and no doubt apple ignored it cause it’s not an apple silicon issue
It feels bad cause based on forums hundreds of mac user keep waiting for a patch that’s not coming. Blizzard can’t fix it, and apple won’t fix it. What users need is a reliable way to backup data and revert to macOS 13.x but that’s a hard sell cause it’s hard to explain to users why not one but two triple A companies aren’t willing to help them. Why a company like blizzard won’t invest resources into mac and why a company like apple abandons older hardware so quickly (especially during an architecture transition.)
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So basically I cant play wow on my Macbook anymore without backing everything up and reverting to macOS 13.x and there probably wont be any solution from Apple or Blizzard in sight.
That really really sucks.
I work for Apple. What specifically is “hosed” about the Iris driver in Sonoma? If someone could tell me I might be able to ask someone whose pay grade it is to deal with that. No promises though. I have a MacBook Air somewhere in my house that has an Iris GPU. If I can find it, I’ll install WOW and try it myself. The worst they can do is tell me to go kick rocks.
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You might be able to find some of stack traces in the big thread. I’m also pretty sure blizzard emailed apple about it too months ago. I’ll see if I can find out if they have an open radar/FB id for it. it’s likely blizzard woulda just forwarded it directly to engineers vs opening a radar though.
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Is there any way I can show logs of my issues to help you troubleshoot it? The problem is my game doesn’t officially crash crash where it asks me to submit an error log after, it just stutters then freezes until I alt tab out, then the world moves again, and when I alt tab back to WoW it stutters and freezes again. This will happen a few times until I can’t alt tab out anymore and have to hard reset my laptop. It happens with no addons on and graphics set to bare minimum.
Yeah some people only have the driver freeze then recover, others have it go full panic and then more common on retail is application just crashes outright on launch.
Any panic logs or crash reports are useful. panic logs probably most useful cause it actually shows where driver faulted. app crash just basically reports something went wrong but doesn’t get deep into it. Freezes and recovery will usually just log in console app that the gpu driver hung and restarted.
I don’t have an Intel Mac ATM to fool with atm but my first and most random guess is going to be that Intel based clients should default to “Metal (Legacy)” because standard out of the box Metal is probably built for the GPU on the M1-M3 silicon Macs.
Just wanted to point out something, No where on Blizzard specs or system reequipments does Blizzard say or suggest one use a laptop for playing the game. It just lists minimum and recommended system requirements and Most of those players reporting these issues ARE using laptops. I would personally avoid using a laptop for playing any version of wow. But if it works for you then by all means go for it. With those whom may not be familiar with laptop issues, then you need to avoid using a laptop for wow.
apple silicon laptops (except for air) are actually really good.
the issue is more along the lines of the laptops in question having issues don’t even have dedicated gpus at all and very low low low end intel iris integrated ones. top it off, somehow the driver for that specific iris class gpu broke in sonoma. it worked prior, poorly but it works. Now they just don’t work at all.
Apple is full throttle on this apple silicon train that they’re not really paying much mind to such an old driver they are shying away from going forward.
Again I’m not doubting anyone who knows what they are doing like yourself… but others may not be so familiar with the system or laptops. So as I said if it works for you then use it. if it doesn’t, no matter how hard they try the issue will never be corrected. had a power mac once… and I’ve never had a laptop due to these types of issues.
I dont find this particularly helpful to the discussion of the issues. You’re in the Mac support section where id be safe to assume that ~75% of the people posting in here are on Mac laptops and it seems your advice for the issues is simply don’t use that. WoW has worked fine on multiple Mac laptops for me for 8+ years. Of course gaming not on a laptop is better - that goes without saying, but that does not change the fact that this game worked perfectly fine on laptops until a week ago. We’re here trying to find solutions to our issues not just a simply “Dont game on macbook” type of solutions.
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There’s nothing wrong with the Apple Silicon Air laptops. The pro models nowadays are basically overkill for all but 80% of Apple’s customers. My wife plays WOTLK Classic on a 15" Air M2 - 100+ fps in everything.
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I beg to differ there. Yes they get job done at basic settings, but they aren’t made for running at max load prolongged. they do thermal throttle. It’s well documented and even teardowns reveal why. Not only are they fanless, the passive cooling is inadaquate because the engineering of machine put keeping your lap cool a higher priority than keeping the processor cool. Basically it has poor heat transfer to chasis so it can actually cool itself well. It’s understandable why they did it that way, because they don’t intent for air to be a prosumer machine so when it’s used like one they’d honestly rather it throttled than transferred heat to the chasis
I see issues all the time on macgaming reddit and discord too with the air. largely due to two issues.
Almost always they are only configured with 8GB, that’s mistake 1. they’re always gonna stutter and run poor with that for gaming unless it’s something simple as wow classic or minecraft. of course even those will run bad if you so much as have chrome or safari open in a few tabs…
issue 2 is that they don’t accept the air can’t actually run at 100% load for long. The sweet spot for graphics setting is basically a balancing game of keeping machine under max load to avoid the therm throttling hitches.
My advice to any gamer though, just get pro. Even a lower end one. just avoid using a machine that’s clearly not designed for what they are using it for. gaming or heavy production work.
But if user still just needs an air for budget or whatever. it MUST be 16GB or more memory, and it must be treated like a prius . don’t put the pedal to the metal on it.