Apple has announced today the new mac mini and macbooks. Will WoW support the new CPU/GPU 8core? Will WoW support Big Sur? it will be release on 12 November.
Thanks
3 Likes
Dear Blizzard,
I wanted to ask if WoW will become a “universal app” on the new Apple Silicon Macs at some point, or if you are planning to keep it just x86 native which will drastically impact performance permanently.
I think that also a Linux client would be helpful to get a bigger customer base.
Thanks for your answer and best regards,
2 Likes
I wouldn’t hold my breath in the short term. The earliest announcements could come during the online Blizzcon next year but I am skeptical. Blizzard might decide that supporting the new ARM based Macs is not worth the effort required to port the game to a different CPU architecture.
Linux support is unlikely to happen ever due to a negligible market share.
Build target was seen long ago but officially AFAIK it wasn’t announced. Also wait for third party benchmarks as the multipliers were made high on purpose. Their lowest mac mini has an i3 that is quad core and has UHD 630 - that’s an obsolete iGPU for 2020 and they did compare to that 
I don’t see them dropping support for macs anytime soon so the answer is yes.
Plus the headaches of supporting multiple distributions, each with its own quirks.
you are right. X86 is dead on the long run. RISC-V will at some point capture everything so anyway Blizzard will still have to tinker at this middle aged game somehow
I believe its too early to wait for official statement from Blizzard. Best we can see is announcement first months in 2021.
Based of what we see so far, I believe that Bliz will move to ARM territory very fast, because this is the future. First benchmarks just appears and shows that base model mobile CPU beating both Intel and AMD in higher class. Even more - benchmark show similar productivity like iMac Pro…Same valid for GPU…
The absolute best scenario is that the drop off in support for Macs (Overwatch, Diablo 4, etc) was due to Apple letting developers know that this switch was going to happen within a few years. That would mean Blizzard would not only support current Mac clients on the new chip but also include support for what we’ve missed out on like Overwatch and Diablo 4.
We can dream.
From an API perspective not that much is changing. You have to recompile the game for different CPU arch but APIs stay the same, at least majority of it. You still have Metal API and other OSX APIs as they were. There likely will be some optimization to be done and taking big/little CPU into account but stopping OS X support just due to upcoming arch change isn’t that realistic.
There’s a youtube video from “the tech chap” and he was interviewing two apple emplyees about the new macs, and one of them (Bob Borchers) stated that “we’ve tested hundreds of apps under rosetta and whether it’s office, adobe, discord, dota 2, blabla, WORLD OF WARCRAFT, etc, they all work great”
It might work now because of the Rosetta 2 Virtualisatioin, but even though the M1 Macs may show good benchmarks those benchmarks are compared to integrated graphics. WoW doesn’t run well on Mac’s on just integrated graphics anyway (unless you don’t mind low graphic settings). Don’t think the M1 Macs can compete with the AMD discrete graphics cards yet.
I don’t think, search on google “Apple Silicon m1 benchmarks” . In benchmarks M1 Macbook AIR (<< air), outperform Macbook Pro 16’ (late 2019).
Here we are in new territory, i’ll say something like you after my first try, not before. I’m waiting my mini (16gb memory - 1tb hd - delivery 16/12)
If the M1 chip is not satisfactory at medium-high graphics settings (7 should be fine), I will return it immediately, unfortunately it does not support eGPUs so the GPU is not upgradeable
Do I expect too much? Maybe, but Apple promises magic and I expect something extraordinary from such a small chip
Wait for third party benchmarks where the iGPU is tested on actual games. They did compare it vaguely to their previous mac mini which has UHD 630 so it’s not that hard to beat it… and WoW Mac version did run rather well on Intel iGPUS for what they were.
You should expect GTX 1050 - 1050 Ti level of performance. At mode 7 1080p GTX 1050 Ti in Ardenweald has around 50 FPS average, above 100 FPS in Bastion and almost 100 FPS in Dazar’alor harbor view. With higher resolution of the screen you would have to set the render scale so that it renders 1080p.
Also do note that with Big Sur update they made your data tracking even more obnoxious (they track what apps you run and when and where you are and can even blacklist apps they don’t want you to run).
M1 scored 1687 in geekbench first tests, and this was with Air, if you get a Mac mini I don’t think it should be any problem, it has active cooling so of course the gpu cores will be clocked at higher speeds. I can post here the tests when I get mine on 23Nov
What I can say for the moment is that I upgraded to BiG Sur on my iMac (i9 max specs) and WOW plays great and with more fps than it should on Catalina. Actually everything is faster on BiG Sur (fcpx, Safari, Davinci Resolve 17, etc). Im on preorder for a Macbook pro M1 (bought it for work ofc) and I will test it as soon as I have it in my hands. I’m really very very curious to see how is it going to perform via Rosetta 2 and compare fps against my iMac! From cpu perspective its pretty sure that M1 is going to get amazing results running WoW if you think that it beats the Macbook Pro 16’’ with i9-9980. From SSD perspective the performance in loading times should be also great as Apple is saying that SSD on M1 will have double performance. We have to see how the M1 8 core GPU will perform against dgpus running WoW. Metal scores for the moment shows not great scores on apple macbook air but the new SOC will have some advantages also that Im expecting. Exciting times…
I’m also a mac user and interest by Game performance. Thanks for sharing that !
World of Warcraft will run absolutely fine on M1 macs, WoW is not all that CPU intensive and Rosetta 2 is fantastic. Even without a universal app. I’m fairly certain the M1 chip will outpace all but the latest 5000 series radeon chips in the 16" MacBook Pro. Looking at benchmarks currently everyone’s in for a treat.
My M1 Air arrives tomorrow and will definitely give it a try.
- Mac mini with M1 chip faster than all Intel Macs in single-core tests
- Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac in Single Core Benchmark.
I’ve seen a Cinebench scores and they weren’t faster than a desktop Ryzen 3600X so I doubt a low TDP part is actually faster than TDP unrestricted parts 