Tim Millet, Apple’s vice president of platform architecture, once said in an interview:
“Gamers are a serious bunch. I don’t think we’re going to overstate and say we’re going to make the Mac a great gaming platform overnight, but we’re going to think about this for the long term.”
It will not happen overnight to make Mac a gaming device for more players. Fortunately, there are already many games optimized for Mac on the market. As early as the era of Intel chips, many of Blizzard’s games provided support for Mac. After the release of Apple chips, Blizzard also optimized its games as soon as possible, so that Mac users can also enjoy a smooth experience.
On August 27, the new Warcraft expansion “World of Warcraft: War to the Core” was officially launched, and the game has achieved native support for Macs equipped with Apple chips. This means that when the national server returns, all Macs equipped with Apple’s self-developed chips will not need to download third-party apps, and can play “World of Warcraft” directly through Battle.net.
How is the gaming experience?
The method of experiencing “World of Warcraft” on Mac is the same as before. You only need to download the Mac version of Battle.net, log in with the original national server ID and then download and play. However, “World of Warcraft” has developed into a large online game of more than 100G, so before downloading, we still need to confirm whether we have enough storage space.
After entering the game, you can see that “World of Warcraft” has adopted the Metal graphics interface, which means that “World of Warcraft” has been fully optimized for the Mac ecosystem. From the actual test results, when “World of Warcraft” is set to the highest image quality and runs in the wild, the temperature of the MacBook Pro equipped with the M3 Max chip is controlled reasonably, the hot zone is located on the left side of the keyboard, and the fan noise is similar to that of daily video editing.
World of Warcraft has adopted the Metal graphics interface
“World of Warcraft” is a game that has higher requirements on the CPU, but not on the GPU, so Apple’s self-developed chips using the ARM architecture can reap certain benefits. The M3 Max has a 14-core central processor with 10 performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores. At the same time, the M series chips use a unified memory architecture, and the CPU and GPU can access unified high-bandwidth, low-latency memory, which can also ensure that the game has a high degree of smoothness at high image quality.
From the frame rate detection panel on the right, you can see that when using a MacBook Pro to run “World of Warcraft” in the wild, its frame rate is roughly around 90 to 120 frames. When the scene is complex or a dungeon is being played, the frame rate can be maintained at 60 frames.
If you are using a fanless MacBook Air, you can still play World of Warcraft, but considering the heat dissipation, we recommend lowering the image quality. World of Warcraft does not have too many complex special effects, so lowering the image quality will not have a big impact on the actual gaming experience, and a slightly lower image quality can also reduce the burden on the M3 chip and improve the stability of the entire machine.
Of course, if you plan to use your MacBook Air for a long time to play games, it is best to equip it with a cooler.
Mac native support for World of Warcraft is a good start
“Who uses a Mac to play games?”
This is a phrase we often hear. And when you open the search engine and type “Mac game meme pictures”, you will see a lot of meme pictures designed by players with their imagination. This also means that even though the performance of Apple’s self-developed chips is constantly improving every year, Mac is still at the bottom of the contempt chain in the gaming circle.
In recent years, Apple has also been active in the gaming field, whether it is the game porting tools launched at WWDC, the addition of hardware-level ray tracing to the M3 chip, or the game mode on macOS, all of which are aimed at extending the reach of Mac to the gaming world.
Game Porting Toolkit
Going deeper into the gaming field does not only rely on Apple itself, but also requires the support of game developers. And now, thanks to the unified chip architecture, macOS not only has many native games, but also many games on iOS/iPadOS. Including macOS native games such as “Planet Reboot”, “Crystal Core”, and “Fantasy Tower”, as well as iPadOS games such as “Honkai Impact 3” and “Warm Snow”, all of which have greatly expanded the Mac game ecosystem.
Games that run on Mac
From the current point of view, Mac can already meet the needs of users to “play with their own computers in their spare time”. You can play directly with the keyboard and mouse, or connect through a game controller. The high energy efficiency provided by Apple’s self-developed chips and the longer battery life of MacBook can make the gaming experience more enjoyable. Of course, I also hope that Apple can lower the threshold of storage space. Today, large-scale games are already hundreds of GB in size, and the limited storage space of the standard version is indeed a big challenge for players.
As for World of Warcraft’s native support for Macs with Apple chips, I think this is a good start, allowing more developers to see that the current hardware performance of Macs is already capable of running large-scale 3D online games smoothly, and they only need to adapt to Metal to get a smooth user experience. In addition, Tim Millet, Apple’s vice president of chip architecture, also said in an interview with the media that Apple is bringing more APIs to Metal, which will also allow developers to better complete the adaptation work.
As an aside, in addition to World of Warcraft, Hearthstone may become Blizzard’s second game to support Mac. Hearthstone has already provided a native Mac version. After its return, the official will most likely bring a native gaming experience in the Mac ecosystem to Mac players as soon as possible.
