Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

us.forums.blizzard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 231 posts

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

#221

Post by ogre_codes »

lmm wrote: post #96
ogre_codes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impression I got was that it was a lot slower than a 30% performance hit, but perhaps the Qualcomm CPU is that much slower? If so, it really begs the question—Why bother making a tablet-laptop thing which performs so poorly?

The tablet-laptop form factor is great, and a lot of people simply don't need high performance but do need to run some specific line of business application from 2003, so including x86 emulation makes sense.

It's a bad cycle.

Lackluster performance means low adoption. Low adoption means developers have no incentive to support it. Lack of developer support means little or no software will be written for the platform so performance never improves. Repeat.

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

#222

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Razengan wrote: post #140
tw04 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(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…

> 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. How the hell were they not sued for that?? That is anti-competitive as hell. Google is still doing shit like that e.g. by actively hindering Picture-in-Picture on iOS for years.

Google was de facto running the Federal Trade Commission during most of the Obama administration. The lead commissioner was a paid shill who wrote "academic" articles about how Google shouldn't face antitrust scrutiny while a law professor.

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

#223

Post by slg »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #220
slg wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the M1 chip isn't competing with discrete graphics, at least yet. The M1 is replacing integrated graphics in these machines. Integrated graphics also trail discrete graphics by years so it isn't really a knock on the M1 that it does too. That leaves two primary questions. Does the integrated graphics of the M1 beat integrated graphics of Intel and AMD? What does Apple plan to do to compete with discrete graphics…

> But the M1 chip isn't competing with discrete graphics, at least yet. I understand that. I was responding to a comment that referenced a near future in which the Apple chips would compete with discrete graphics. Observing the distance they have to go is relevant to that speculation.

I'm just not sure the distance between integrated and discrete graphics performance is a better indicator of Apple's hardware capabilities than the differences between Apple, Intel, and AMD integrated graphics. It is a safe assumption that Apple isn't going to release an identical M1 as a competitor for discrete graphics. So why compare this to something in a different product class rather than judge it on how well it achieves the purpose it is designed to achieve?

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

#224

Post by greedo »

stu2b50 wrote: post #66
cdolan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does that mean? Bootcamp is just running windows on the machine. You're gaming on an Intel cpu and an AMD gpu. That doesn't change because Apple installed another OS on the system. Sufficient or not is a weird way to put it.

The GPUs that Apple typically uses are far outclassed by what's available for Windows.

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

#225

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

barrenko wrote: post #171
ogre_codes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running x86 code via Rosetta on the MacBook Air is significantly faster than it is running on the previous generation. With the Surface X, that isn't remotely the case. It's a pretty major gap. This is from the Verge's review of the Surface Pro X: > The worst part is that even if an app installs, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have a great experience. Photoshop installs and opens just fine on the Surface Pro X, but…

Basic example is how even the MS's very own Visual Studio is horrible slowbloat (won't even mention how ugly), compared to let'say IntelliJ editors on the same Windows that are noticeably faster.

Have you tried running VS in Software-mode without hardware acceleration of the UI/graphics?

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

#226

Post by cdolan »

stu2b50 wrote: post #66
cdolan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does that mean? Bootcamp is just running windows on the machine. You're gaming on an Intel cpu and an AMD gpu. That doesn't change because Apple installed another OS on the system. Sufficient or not is a weird way to put it.

I mean that mac hardware is terrible for video games in general, and that at some $1.5-$3k avg price tag, "Macs" (in the hardware sense) are almost always outclassed by PCs (in the hardware sense) that are less than half their cost.

The OP commented games were "always available through bootcamp or emulation", which is true of a Windows-only game running on your Mac hardware via Bootbamp/Parallels... my point is, Macs provide a sub-par, no good, very little fun experience for anything but the simplest of games.

And before I sound like a typical PC bro, this line of thinking is coming from someone who has exclusively owned about a dozen Macs starting with the iBook Clamshell, and only recently built my first gaming PC during COVID. I'd never try to play a game on a Mac again lol

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

#227

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

slg wrote: post #223
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the M1 chip isn't competing with discrete graphics, at least yet. I understand that. I was responding to a comment that referenced a near future in which the Apple chips would compete with discrete graphics. Observing the distance they have to go is relevant to that speculation.

I'm just not sure the distance between integrated and discrete graphics performance is a better indicator of Apple's hardware capabilities than the differences between Apple, Intel, and AMD integrated graphics. It is a safe assumption that Apple isn't going to release an identical M1 as a competitor for discrete graphics. So why compare this to something in a different product class rather than judge it on how well i…

> I'm just not sure the distance between integrated and discrete graphics performance is a better indicator of Apple's hardware capabilities

It's not a better indicator in any way, except in terms of being more relevant to the comment I was responding to at the top of the thread, which contemplated the possibility that Apple's chips would become competitive with discrete graphics cards in the foreseeable future.

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

#228

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

ogre_codes wrote: post #221
lmm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tablet-laptop form factor is great, and a lot of people simply don't need high performance but do need to run some specific line of business application from 2003, so including x86 emulation makes sense.

It's a bad cycle. Lackluster performance means low adoption. Low adoption means developers have no incentive to support it. Lack of developer support means little or no software will be written for the platform so performance never improves. Repeat.

> Lackluster performance means low adoption

And yet Electron rules cross-platform desktop development, not Qt nor wxWidgets or openstep.

Developers are fine with worse performance - even lackluster performance - if a platform or framework offers some other compelling advantage, especially _developer performance_ (i.e. it saves money).

Electron saves money because creating one-off custom UI widgets can be done easily and cheaply with just HTML+CSS+JS. While there are many things that are literally impossible with HTML+CSS+JS at-present (such as "splitting" a rendered UI, like how iOS 5 did with its notification banners and home-screen folders), but besides certain flashy effects everything is doable quickly. Whereas building a custom UI in any other platform would take days or weeks just to get a prototype done if you couldn't hack-on additions to an existing "UI component".

So your line of reason would be improved by saying:

"Lackluster performance with no other benefits means low adoption", the rest then follows.

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

#229

Post by expenses2 »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #194
spystath wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe the main problem with gaming on mac was the architecture or their anaemic graphic cards but rather their non-standard mac-only graphics API (metal), their deprecation of OpenGL, spotty support of Vulkan (if any) and removal of 32-bit support (for older games). The first three are not really a problem for big engine makers, as they can afford to implement additional backends but it is an issue for smal…

Metal doesn't get enough hate for how awful and idiosyncratic it is. If you want to remain cross platform and support Metal you're so severely restricted that the best you can hope for is to just special case a bunch of features for non-Apple machines and not support them at all on Mac. It really feels like Apple wanted to kill gaming on Macs entirely. I understand that they want to maintain control over their own gr…

Could you go into more detail about how it's idiosyncratic? I'd love to find more information on what it does wrong vs something like vulkan.

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

#230

Post by Jweb_Guru »

expenses2 wrote: post #229
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metal doesn't get enough hate for how awful and idiosyncratic it is. If you want to remain cross platform and support Metal you're so severely restricted that the best you can hope for is to just special case a bunch of features for non-Apple machines and not support them at all on Mac. It really feels like Apple wanted to kill gaming on Macs entirely. I understand that they want to maintain control over their own gr…

Could you go into more detail about how it's idiosyncratic? I'd love to find more information on what it does wrong vs something like vulkan.

For some indication, check out a lot of issue threads for WebGPU (the Rust cross platform graphics library). Many, many features need to be restricted or put behind feature flags due to either lack of Metal support, or Metal having bizarre restrictions compared to other platforms. As a random example, border color is limited to 2 or 3 colors for Metal, and has no restrictions at all for anything else. There are also entire features (like geometry shaders) missing from Metal; for many common usecases you can replicate the functionality with something else, but usually not in a way that easily translates to any of the other APIs (and pretty much nobody on Earth writes games just targeting Macs).

Hence, the easiest thing to do for most games is to just drop Mac support and not worry about it. IMO that's the biggest reason by far why people stopped bothering to port new games to Mac; between not updating OpenGL past 4.1 at best and Metal being so idiosyncratic, it's just not worth it, and since people have learned gaming on Macs sucks (largely because of the outdated and idiosyncratic APIs), most people who want to play games on a Mac have just been installing Windows anyway.

This is all not even to mention that Mac laptops tend to have far too high a resolution for the onboard GPU to perform well for any but the most rudimentary games; hopefully this has been addressed with the M1 batch having a much more powerful GPU. But the issues with Metal remain and will continue to remain until Apple either fixes Metal to make it a more Vulkan-like target, or adds really good Vulkan support.

Post reply on HN