With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta.
We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon.
While our testing has been successful, we’re highly aware of the nature of day one support with updates like this. Please let us know if you run into any issues that may be related to Apple Silicon in our Technical Support forum.
I wasn’t sure whether to expect this or not, although I’m glad it’s happening, even if I no longer own Macs. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this though, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised. You guys are always first class on Mac support (except Overwatch, but I really understand that one)
Hopefully this shift in architecture will also pave the way for Macs running World of Warcraft and other games better in thinner designs - Apple has been focusing so hard on thin designs that they nearly killed gaming on their platform; but with ARM chips maybe they can have their cake and eat it, too.
And that means Overwatch will now play properly on a Mac. Even an Air. Time to port it over?
Maybe Overwatch 2 as well?
Would love to see some performance numbers as soon as they are available. If Apple marketing is correct, and early reports from all over the place seem to confirm them, performance will be staggering and blow everything comparable out of the water.
No it isn’t, and it’s pretty easy to support at least the biggest few distros. It’s not like the graphic drivers differ. People already manage to run WoW without issues on Linux machines, it’s just not officially supported, and people have to find out how to make it work themselves.
If they can support mac and arm, they can support linux.
Vulkan or OpenGL?
X or Wayland?
x86_64 or ARM64?
Rely on nonfree GPU drivers or not?
The Bnet client should be easy to port as it no longer has WPF dependencies. One thing realistic to do would be to aim for Proton support on Linux but I doubt Blizzard is going to collaborate with Valve.
And tbf, with a few minor wine hacks, it already runs great in wine. The Desktop Linux community is a community of majorily hobbyists and DYIers - the current state is good enough.
Porting to ARM Mac - well, I expected it to be harder because I expected them to use a lot of inline-ASM. Seems like they don’t. But it’s a completely different thing to aim for Linux support.
Yeah I have no clue as I’m writing this from my linux machine, and I totally don’t use linux on a daily base, and I definitely haven’t been using linux for the past 10+ years.
Going to disagree here. When using linux that long, you’ve had to work around with things, manually compile binaries and libraries for odd edge cases etc. I come from a time where I had to manually compile my wifi drivers on an old dell inspiron laptop.
I know my way around linux
Supporting linux is a “don’t want”, not a “can’t”.
