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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

#71

Post by oneplane »

cdolan wrote: post #55
slg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You won't get the highest end AAA games, but those games usually aren't coming to Mac anyway But even if they didn't come to Mac they were always available through bootcamp or emulation. Is it simply not an option on this new hardware? That seems like an important step back.

I never found Bootcamp nor Parallels/emulation to sufficiently play a modern video game. A $3k mac always underperformed a $500 desktop windows PC in my experience

I suppose that would depend on what you put inside that $3k mac. It's very easy to slap a price tag on something 'wrong' and then complain it doesn't do the right thing ;-)

A PC with $4k worth of PCIe storage but no video output or networking would be very expensive but not very good at games.

A Mac with a reasonable video card (say, an RX580 or better) and a general i5-level CPU would run Windows and most games just fine. Won't be a 144Hz 4k party, but 1440/1080 for recent games on decent settings and at least 60FPS will work. But that's not a lot of difference to any other computer...

Difference would be what you start off with. If you buy any $1000 laptop that only has a CPU-integrated GPU but does have Thunderbolt 3, you can add an eGPU for that GPU power that you need and you'd be good to go.

If you buy a cheaper laptop that happens to have some sort of 1050 in it, it would be cheaper, but it probably won't have Thunderbolt 3 and then you'd be stuck with a GPU that will be a bottleneck faster than your CPU.

The biggest problem I'd see is that most Macs don't come with dedicate GPUs, and when they do it's a midrange AMD or workstation type GPU, neither of which are great for games (regardless of what computer you stick those in). The higher tier AMD GPUs did come to later Macs, but at that point (the 5000 series) it wasn't really all that good. Too bad with the 6000 series we don't know if Apple will even add any third party GPU anymore. Also too bad that they got in a fight with nvidia over their crap QA years ago and never got back together. Could have been great...

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#72

Post by oneplane »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #49
an_opabinia wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? It is definitely the death of gaming as we know it on PCs. Blizzard didn't bother porting Overwatch to macOS, their latest engine, and even that game was released in 2016. They ported to the PS4. It's just too small of a market. Nintendo Switch level games should port fine, many are developed on cross platform engines like Unity that already s…

Curious why you think it's the death of pc gaming, unless you just mean Mac gaming

He means to say 'death of PC gaming on a Mac' because some people forget that all computers that are stand-alone for a person to use are "Personal Computers" (and not mainframes which is what the distinction is for).

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#73

Post by oneplane »

NoPicklez wrote: post #2

Wow, I'm surprised! Great job Blizz Blizzard has always been good at supporting Mac's, even going back as far as Warcraft 3.

Going back to WarCraft 1. And StarCraft 1. And Diablo 1. But also Blackthorne, before they made any RTS.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#74

Post by Aperocky »

andreasley wrote: post #67
slg wrote: post #11

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 b…

Gaming on the Mac was basically dead and will be revived with Apple Silicon, I believe. Even the MacBook Air now has enough power to run modern games smoothly, and more powerful models are to follow. A considerable amount of iOS games are suddenly playable on the new Macs, too. And yes, native support for Apple Silicon and Metal is clearly the way forward.

I just ran Kerbal Space Program on the Air, in addition to being smooth and having no discernible lag. Htop says it's only using half of one core.. and the laptop isn't even heating up.

This is the dream laptop. It's the one product that is 5 years ahead of everyone else, like the iPhone 4.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#75

Post by oneplane »

alexgaribay wrote: post #64
wmichelin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd LOVE to have a native macOS client for Overwatch. Since I upgraded to a 2019 16" MacBook Pro, my eGPU no longer works in Bootcamp due to the dreaded Error 12 and I can't resolve it. My eGPU works flawlessly in macOS. Plus, I hate using Windows and want to avoid it if at all possible.

You can fix Error 12 by using an eGPU loader in UEFI (you can just put it on a USB drive). The problem is that Windows sets the PCIe address space wrong and then it can't properly talk to the GPU anymore. It happened during one of those large Windows feature updates last year. You can find setup and documentation on egpu.io, goalque is the author. (it's called something like automate-eGPU EFI)

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#76

Post by oneplane »

Talanes wrote: post #52
yreg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does certainly feel like they forgot about Mac when they got the console base with Overwatch.

Yep, oddly enough they made the game engine themselves like they did with almost all of their other games; apparently this time they didn't make it cross-platform.

Pretty strange considering the other (arguably more complicated) engines were supported from day 1, even their unreleased FPS (Ghost?) was going to be launched like that.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#77

Post by oneplane »

duskwuff wrote: post #9
cdolan wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Diablo was released for PC in January 1997, and didn't show up on Mac until May 1998. StarCraft had a similar delay (March 1998 to March 1999). All three WarCraft games were simultaneous releases for Windows and Mac OS, though.

IIRC it was't purely a post-release-port, they did have parallel development tracks before anything was released and for some titles they didn't want to risk the upfront cost for the relatively small percentage right away.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#78

Post by oneplane »

falcolas wrote: post #53
yreg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most recent of Blizzard’s mainline games was released about 5 years ago. The second-to-most recent a decade. Diablo III, HOTS, and Starcraft are all now in maintenance mode, with no new development. Warcraft III was recently “remastered” into oblivion, replacing the original game for all its fans. Only WoW and Overwatch are currently active, and both are fueled mostly by their microtransactions. Yes, WoW has a su…

I fear that is all pretty much true. I suspect a downside of the mass market game business becoming so generalised and generic. Business goes where the money is, and apparently it's not in the niches of old (which is what PC gaming was tbh - we thought it was big but it was nothing compared to where we are now)

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#79

Post by Loranubi »

tw04 wrote: post #65
oneplane wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is trying to have it both ways; turns out that's not what people really want (and when it's all about people they just fail -- Windows Phone anyone?), but because business clients (which generally doesn't mean the actual business end-users but some other department) tend to buy whatever looks good on paper. It all just keeps going on with no real improvements. This disconnect between people and products has…

>(and when it's all about people they just fail -- Windows Phone anyone?) Everyone I knew who had a windows phone seemed to love it. If MS were taking a run at it today it would likely succeed. The nail in the coffin was Google refusing to write a Youtube app for Windows Phone and THEN blocking the app that MS wrote themselves. I'm still shocked the EU didn't tear them apart on that move. It's about as anti-competiti…

I had one and I loved it as well.

> The nail in the coffin was Google refusing to write a Youtube app for Windows Phone and THEN blocking the app that MS wrote themselves. There were at least 2 great third party youtube apps and youtube worked well in the browser as well. Including background play support which seems not to work on other platforms easily.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#80

Post by to11mtm »

tw04 wrote: post #65
oneplane wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is trying to have it both ways; turns out that's not what people really want (and when it's all about people they just fail -- Windows Phone anyone?), but because business clients (which generally doesn't mean the actual business end-users but some other department) tend to buy whatever looks good on paper. It all just keeps going on with no real improvements. This disconnect between people and products has…

>(and when it's all about people they just fail -- Windows Phone anyone?) Everyone I knew who had a windows phone seemed to love it. If MS were taking a run at it today it would likely succeed. The nail in the coffin was Google refusing to write a Youtube app for Windows Phone and THEN blocking the app that MS wrote themselves. I'm still shocked the EU didn't tear them apart on that move. It's about as anti-competiti…

I'd say the bigger nail in the coffin was, ironically, Microsoft's level of security/sandboxing.

tl;dr - Snapchat and a lot of other 'killer apps' never were written for the platform, and at least some of that was because the apps on Android/iOS did things Microsoft wouldn't let you (I think tracking when the user took a screenshot was one)

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