This is a related tangent, but I haven't seen this addressed anywhere else yet so might as well ask it here. What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? With the death of bootcamp and the apparent difficulty with emulation, is the only hope for individual developers to update to native support like Blizzard is doing here? And what does the future of GPUs look like? Are there expected to be dedicated GPUs on future Macbook Pros, Mac Pros, and iMacs or are they all expected to be SOCs going forward?
World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
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Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#12Wow, I'm surprised! Great job Blizz Blizzard has always been good at supporting Mac's, even going back as far as Warcraft 3.
Thankfully long before that. I recall Diablo 1 was released for Mac OS (9?) only a few weeks/months after PC, and Warcraft I and II had full Mac Support! Too bad the GPU race has left Macs in the dust.
I remember going over to a friends place who owned a Mac in order to play Warcraft 2 network games.
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#13This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…
It’s probably more complicated than that: Microsoft’s customers have traditionally been very different from Apple’s, and they valued perpetual backwards compatibility over Apple’s approach.
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#14For anyone out of the loop: Blizzard is a dead, dead company for many reasons, some political, most game-related, all stemming from mismanagement. Yes, they make money now, but their IPs have lost the goodwill they once had with their customers. I’ll hold my excrement until I see a similar announcement from Epic.
They are consistently making wildy successful games over many genres: Warcrafts, Starcrafts, Diablo, WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch.
I wouldn’t be so trigger-happy to call a company dead just because it has been a few years since the last major title. Same goes for Bethesda.
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#15This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…
It’s probably more complicated than that: Microsoft’s customers have traditionally been very different from Apple’s, and they valued perpetual backwards compatibility over Apple’s approach.
If you liked apple because it ran your Mac apps, you already got off that train when they moved to Intel in the first place.
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#16This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…
It’s probably more complicated than that: Microsoft’s customers have traditionally been very different from Apple’s, and they valued perpetual backwards compatibility over Apple’s approach.
Yes! Today is a good day to reread Phil Haack’s 2014 essay on the lengths MS goes to for backwards compatibility: https://haacked.com/archive/2014/05/27/backwards-compatibili...
Edit: Haack heavily cites Raymond Chen from 2003: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42...
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#17Wow, I'm surprised! Great job Blizz Blizzard has always been good at supporting Mac's, even going back as far as Warcraft 3.
Except for Overwatch, RIP. Also Diablo 3 has always run terribly on MacOS. Pretty much only WoW runs decently. Maybe Starcraft 2 used to be okay but it since became way worse.
They probably ported WoW because they cannot afford to drop support for platform where they have tons of existing paying customers.
If they truly cared about the Mac, they would release Overwatch for macOS. It runs just fine on modern Macs via bootcamp.
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#18This is a related tangent, but I haven't seen this addressed anywhere else yet so might as well ask it here. What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? With the death of bootcamp and the apparent difficulty with emulation, is the only hope for individual developers to update to native support like Blizzard is doing here? And what does the future of GPUs look like? Are there expected to b…
Might start to make sense to do "upscaled iOS ports". iOS is lucrative enough that many developers will support it anyway. Adding mouse+keyboard support and gamepad support isn't insane and I believe Apple Arcade games require gamepad support. You won't get the highest end AAA games, but those games usually aren't coming to Mac anyway
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#19This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…
I think we'd see a serious boom in Windows on ARM if ARM vendors had a performance benefit to offer and Microsoft implemented a backwards compatibility layer as Apple has in this case. The difference here is in the offering. Microsoft was making a tablet offering where they're just not competitive with no ability to use x86 software while Apple here is offering much more - backwards compatible and all. Until then the…
> Microsoft implemented a backwards compatibility layer as Apple has in this case
Windows-on-ARM already has 32-bit x86 emulation - and 64-bit x64 emulation is coming soon:
* https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...
* https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315733-64-bit-x86-emul...
I haven't looked too deeply, but it seems to use the same WoW (Windows-on-Windows) mechanism that's been present in Windows NT going back to at least Windows XP 64-bit Edition (no, not 2005's "Windows XP x64", but the original 2001 Windows XP for Intel Itanium IA-64).
> The WOW64 layer of Windows 10 allows x86 code to run on the ARM64 version of Windows 10. x86 emulation works by compiling blocks of x86 instructions into ARM64 instructions with optimizations to improve performance. A service caches these translated blocks of code to reduce the overhead of instruction translation and allow for optimization when the code runs again. The caches are produced for each module so that other apps can make use of them on first launch.
Looks like Windows dynamically translates code in DLLs/EXEs on a JIT/on-demand basis and caches each translated run-of-code.
Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thankfully long before that. I recall Diablo 1 was released for Mac OS (9?) only a few weeks/months after PC, and Warcraft I and II had full Mac Support! Too bad the GPU race has left Macs in the dust.
I remember going over to a friends place who owned a Mac in order to play Warcraft 2 network games.
Warcraft 2 was my first experience playing a cross-platform network game. I was on a PC and I dialled in to my friend’s Mac. Understanding how things are architected now it makes perfect sense, but as a kid my mind was blown since I considered these to be wholly incompatible platforms.