WoW Performance on Apple M1 Mac Mini? 1080p? 1440p?

[SigmaShift]

anyone have any specs on how WoW performs on an Apple M1 Mac Mini, since Blizz patched it to be a native app? 1080p? 1440p? What settings?

I've read on a few forums, it does really well even at medium to high settings, over 60fps. Truth to this?

[dudurududu]

I've seen a couple of youtube videos where it runs really smoothly, but mostly in the air and in low populated places. I would love to see its performance in a raid or an epic battleground

[loadedaxe]

I play on mine at 1440p, I really dont pay attention to my fps as I do not lag, then again I have mine set on preset 5. When I get home and play tonight I will and repost and show my settings, I did have to play with them but I dont remember what all I had to do. I also play SC2 and in maps with 4 players I have to run on low, 2 players I can run on medium. Its not awesome, but you can play and have a decent experience.

There are many videos on the M1 Mini.

here are a few.

[Vash The Stampede]

anyone have any specs on how WoW performs on an Apple M1 Mac Mini, since Blizz patched it to be a native app? 1080p? 1440p? What settings?

I've read on a few forums, it does really well even at medium to high settings, over 60fps. Truth to this?

Don't buy an Apple M1 based machine. Can't stress this enough. Not only it's ARM which means x86 apps will run 50%-75% of it's original performance but not many developers will port their games to it for a while. Blizzard did port it but as you said it's playable on medium settings. Don't be the beta tester for Apple. Wait for the M2 or whatever is the second generation.

[Yizu]

Oh issit emulated? Its not an actual ARM based wow?

[lloose]

Oh issit emulated? Its not an actual ARM based wow?

It is not emulated, its native.

[ldev]

Don't buy an Apple M1 based machine. Can't stress this enough. Not only it's ARM which means x86 apps will run 50%-75% of it's original performance but not many developers will port their games to it for a while. Blizzard did port it but as you said it's playable on medium settings. Don't be the beta tester for Apple. Wait for the M2 or whatever is the second generation.

That's like suggesting to buy a diesel car now that hybrids or even electric cars are very good. You don't buy M1 now if you need top performance - you wait for apple silicone iMac Pro, but otherwise - how can anyone use M1 laptop for two hours - instant wake up, work and export 4k video - it's completely silent, it's not heating up, it's fast, and after that - you still have 18 hours of battery life left - and then waste money on x86 platform?

God damn, booting my gaming PC feels like I'm teleported to 1996 after using M1.

[dacoolist]

That's like suggesting to buy a diesel car now that hybrids or even electric cars are very good. You don't buy M1 now if you need top performance - you wait for apple silicone iMac Pro, but otherwise - how can anyone use M1 laptop for two hours - instant wake up, work and export 4k video - it's completely silent, it's not heating up, it's fast, and after that - you still have 18 hours of battery life left - and then waste money on x86 platform?

God damn, booting my gaming PC feels like I'm teleported to 1996 after using M1.

Even biased due to where I work I think their is a place for gaming pc as well as the m1 doing a lot as well.

For me a lot of people - normal average people MAY want to dive into gaming a little bit when they are bored etc, and I am happy that the M1 is doing a great job.

In the future all chips, intel as well will be able to do it, its just the apple soc or system on a chip is doing a great job being 5NM and the power consumption and output is really good because it's 5NM.

Once intel does it, I'm sure they will bring the speed right in place as well - for me its whatever people want. Me being biased doesn't help deter anyone from buying it but I'll say this.. if this is the first soc for us - what will be the next revision? Will the iMac have like an M1X variant and be even more stacked? or M2 like others have stated.

M1 is fantastic but what's next is what I am super looking forward to

[Gaidax]

Once intel does it...

Once Intel does it - Apple will have 3nm and so on. Apple literally throws $$ booking fab capacities and they get all the bleeding edge fab output there. Intel is plain behind and it will keep being behind for a foreseeable future.

Both Intel and AMD are like kids playing with toy cars compared to what Apple can do with all its insane $$. Apple invests a shitton in being there, that's why their SoCs are a good generation ahead of everyone else and their walled garden scheme allows them to finetune it further to milk every ounce of performance out of what really are quite a tame chips there.

AMD/Intel need to count their blessings with Apple not being interested in selling standalone SoCs and such to be used by 3rd party vendors.

[Thoriangun]

Don't buy an Apple M1 based machine. Can't stress this enough. Not only it's ARM which means x86 apps will run 50%-75% of it's original performance but not many developers will port their games to it for a while. Blizzard did port it but as you said it's playable on medium settings. Don't be the beta tester for Apple. Wait for the M2 or whatever is the second generation.

Gonna be honest here dude, if you are buying apple, theres not many software to get that isnt apple made already.

If you want video editting software, get final cut, just use that over adobe, adobe needs a big slap in the face and face some hardship in the market place cos their software and business model is the worst offender right now so its good knowing final cut has gone even ahead of them here.

audio - get apple logic pro, theres no contest.

For photos, there are some competition to apple and these guys are probably doing more for performance and stability without the sub model that adobe is doing and will likely be on ball to optimise sooner for apple silicon, dont count adobe getting round to it, their gpu acceleration has only been recently added, they are behind.

What you should be saying is, if you are getting apple silicon, make sure you are using appropriate software and fuck adobe hard.

[vsb]

Apple M1 is the worst desktop CPU from Apple. I wouldn't buy it.

[ldev]

Gonna be honest here dude, if you are buying apple, theres not many software to get that isnt apple made already.

If you want video editting software, get final cut, just use that over adobe, adobe needs a big slap in the face and face some hardship in the market place cos their software and business model is the worst offender right now so its good knowing final cut has gone even ahead of them here.

audio - get apple logic pro, theres no contest.

For photos, there are some competition to apple and these guys are probably doing more for performance and stability without the sub model that adobe is doing and will likely be on ball to optimise sooner for apple silicon, dont count adobe getting round to it, their gpu acceleration has only been recently added, they are behind.

What you should be saying is, if you are getting apple silicon, make sure you are using appropriate software and fuck adobe hard.

For video - Davinci Resolve. Better than Premiere/After Effects. For photos - Capture One. Not better than Lightroom, but getting there.

Adobe is cluttered, clunky, expensive af and unstable. Fuck Adobe indeed.

---

Anyways, imagine M1 in Nintendo Switch. God damn.

[Vash The Stampede]

That's like suggesting to buy a diesel car now that hybrids or even electric cars are very good. You don't buy M1 now if you need top performance - you wait for apple silicone iMac Pro, but otherwise - how can anyone use M1 laptop for two hours - instant wake up, work and export 4k video - it's completely silent, it's not heating up, it's fast, and after that - you still have 18 hours of battery life left - and then waste money on x86 platform?

God damn, booting my gaming PC feels like I'm teleported to 1996 after using M1.

Keep in mind we've been down this road before. IBM's PowerPC had manufacturing issues and doesn't meet deadlines that Apple expects. Apple tells everyone that their PowerPC based Macs are the fastest things on Earth. Intel makes the CoreDuo series and completely destros the RISC based PowerPC. This sounds familiar? Intel falls behind in manufacturing, plus they're stuck on 14nm while Apple is enjoying 5nm with the M1. This time around Apple is now making their own chips.

Intel will eventually recover from their series of mistakes they made and will make everyone want their CPU's again. AMD is the real x86 king and they haven't dealt their hand yet. AMD just released Zen3 on 7nm, and we still haven't seen them use their RDNA graphics on their APU's. Apple picked the best time to release their M1, where Intel can't even, and AMD is in between architecture transitions. The M1's most impressive feature is battery life, though the M1 just barely beat the HP Envy x360, but the pro lasted for almost a day.

The main thing is software, as Apple's ARM might push developers away. While Apple's emulation of x86 is impressive, it isn't 100% the same performance. BTW, Apple was able to achieve this by actually implementing some x86 memory features into the M1 for better emulation. Apple knew x86 is still going to be a problem for them. It's really early to be using a new CPU architecture that just got released. Rosetta 2 will work but don't expect miracles.

[ldev]

Keep in mind we've been down this road before. IBM's PowerPC had manufacturing issues and doesn't meet deadlines that Apple expects. Apple tells everyone that their PowerPC based Macs are the fastest things on Earth. Intel makes the CoreDuo series and completely destros the RISC based PowerPC. This sounds familiar? Intel falls behind in manufacturing, plus they're stuck on 14nm while Apple is enjoying 5nm with the M1. This time around Apple is now making their own chips.

Intel will eventually recover from their series of mistakes they made and will make everyone want their CPU's again. AMD is the real x86 king and they haven't dealt their hand yet. AMD just released Zen3 on 7nm, and we still haven't seen them use their RDNA graphics on their APU's. Apple picked the best time to release their M1, where Intel can't even, and AMD is in between architecture transitions. The M1's most impressive feature is battery life, though the M1 just barely beat the HP Envy x360, but the pro lasted for almost a day.

The main thing is software, as Apple's ARM might push developers away. While Apple's emulation of x86 is impressive, it isn't 100% the same performance. BTW, Apple was able to achieve this by actually implementing some x86 memory features into the M1 for better emulation. Apple knew x86 is still going to be a problem for them. It's really early to be using a new CPU architecture that just got released. Rosetta 2 will work but don't expect miracles.

"Barely beat HP envy" - HP envy shuts down at 87 hours, M1 - at 79 hours. Cool. While also underperforming by quite a bit. Cool. Also nice that you link yootoober trash that goes like this - "APPLE BAD" - get views from droids - then "I WAS WRONG". Didn't expect any less from you.

"Rosetta 2 will work but don't expect miracles" - does work at atleast 70% efficiency. Cool.

"Apple's ARM might push developers away" - Adobe releasing betas for ARM. WoW already has. JetBrains released their majority dev tools, others will get a release with 2021.1 versions. Cool. Like remember these posts - https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...1#post52800496 Like, people think that Apple is Google or Microsoft with a 500 dollar badge on their products. No no, Apple is the IT leader, it pushes good shit and people adopt good shit. This is not Microsoft releasing ARM Windows or Google releasing Chromebook, far fucking from it, get it through your thick skull plz, thnx.

"Keep in mind we've been down this road before. IBM's PowerPC had manufacturing issues and doesn't meet deadlines that Apple expects." oh yes, Apple having enough money to buy Intel, AMD and TSMC. Oh yes, this road, where Apple controls their CPUs, not IBM. Yes. This road. We have been on This. "This time around Apple is now making their own chips. " so not this this, other this. Cool.

Overall - pretty cool / cool cool post.

[Vash The Stampede]

"Barely beat HP envy" - HP envy shuts down at 87 hours, M1 - at 79 hours. Cool. While also underperforming by quite a bit.

Like I said, the HP Envy ryzen 5 4500u is outdated. Not Zen3, and still uses Vega graphics. By AMD's own standards this is outdated.

Cool. Also nice that you link yootoober trash that goes like this - "APPLE BAD" - get views from droids - then "I WAS WRONG". Didn't expect any less from you.

But I'm not wrong either.

"Rosetta 2 will work but don't expect miracles" - does work at atleast 70% efficiency. Cool.

At least 50% as capable of x86 emulation and at most 75%.

"Apple's ARM might push developers away" - Adobe releasing betas for ARM. WoW already has. JetBrains released their majority dev tools, others will get a release with 2021.1 versions. Cool. Like remember these posts - https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...1#post52800496

I think Shadowlands is the only native port of a game for the Apple M1. Again, not running at max settings but medium. That's not an accomplishment but like barely matching acceptable standards.

Like, people think that Apple is Google or Microsoft with a 500 dollar badge on their products. No no, Apple is the IT leader, it pushes good shit and people adopt good shit. This is not Microsoft releasing ARM Windows or Google releasing Chromebook, far fucking from it, get it through your thick skull plz, thnx.

I get it, Apple guy is upset from truth. Haven't seen one of those before.

"Keep in mind we've been down this road before. IBM's PowerPC had manufacturing issues and doesn't meet deadlines that Apple expects." oh yes, Apple having enough money to buy Intel, AMD and TSMC. Oh yes, this road, where Apple controls their CPUs, not IBM. Yes. This road. We have been on This. "This time around Apple is now making their own chips. " so not this this, other this. Cool.

Apple having that much money is more of a human rights issue, and not because they make good things. They weren't paying $7 a month in India. How about that forced labor? I digress as I can spend many pages talking about Apple's wealth. More to the point is that whatever Apple does, others mimic them, and that isn't a good thing. Sure the M1 is fast and power efficient, but no upgradeable ram or storage. Especially storage where if something were to go wrong like spilling a drink and killing it, then you can't remove the SSD and save your data. Also the cheapest Apple M1 Macbook is $1300 and that comes with a 256GB SSD. Why? I hope the industry doesn't copy Apple because not everything Apple does is pro-consumer.

[kukkamies]

"Barely beat HP envy" - HP envy shuts down at 87 hours, M1 - at 79 hours. Cool. While also underperforming by quite a bit. Cool. Also nice that you link yootoober trash that goes like this - "APPLE BAD" - get views from droids - then "I WAS WRONG". Didn't expect any less from you.

"Rosetta 2 will work but don't expect miracles" - does work at atleast 70% efficiency. Cool.

"Apple's ARM might push developers away" - Adobe releasing betas for ARM. WoW already has. JetBrains released their majority dev tools, others will get a release with 2021.1 versions. Cool. Like remember these posts - https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...1#post52800496 Like, people think that Apple is Google or Microsoft with a 500 dollar badge on their products. No no, Apple is the IT leader, it pushes good shit and people adopt good shit. This is not Microsoft releasing ARM Windows or Google releasing Chromebook, far fucking from it, get it through your thick skull plz, thnx.

"Keep in mind we've been down this road before. IBM's PowerPC had manufacturing issues and doesn't meet deadlines that Apple expects." oh yes, Apple having enough money to buy Intel, AMD and TSMC. Oh yes, this road, where Apple controls their CPUs, not IBM. Yes. This road. We have been on This. "This time around Apple is now making their own chips. " so not this this, other this. Cool.

Overall - pretty cool / cool cool post.

Your post looks so emotional instead of thinking things through hehe. Could help to calm down a bit and write better sentences and think about the post.

[Vash The Stampede]

1. You are pulling numbers out of your arse.
2. Its not emulation. Its cross compiler.

He said it and he did the benchmarks. Also not every app on Mac OSX is built with cross compiler in mind. So yes, x86 emulation.

You clearly have no idea how M1 works. There are plenty of videos explaining it, just stay away from those made by "PC master race!" youtubers that post nonsense and fake info.

Apple users being Apple users. Buy yourself an Apple M1. You deserve one.

[Thoriangun]

The M1's most impressive feature is battery life

No

have you seen final cut performance vs Adobe piece of shit garbage and hope they suffer in real use?

Final cut on M1 destroys Adobe may they burn in hell garbage.

If anything, Apple has highlighted what their software on the desktop can do vs others at its full potential now, final cut was already better then adobe piece of shit on Intel, this is not a wake up call to Intel or AMD/Nvidia, this is a wakeup call to every software creative suite there is and how they need to be updated properly to be properly utilised.

[Kagthul]

I have to say, though i normally have Vash and idev on ignore because they rarely post anything worthwhile, this was worth hitting "view post" to watch them spew back and forth.

Of the two, however, Vash is more correct in this instance.

M1 is great. It really is.

What it is not is the second coming of Silicon-Christ.

It launched at a time when the competition was in between process transitions, and/or in process of recovering from several years of dead-ends (like AMD did when it took time to recover from that Bulldozer dead end).

Its already pushing the edge of the laws of physics (you're not going to see massive die shrinks coming) because of electron migration kicking in at around 3nm ("real" 3nm - TSMC is highly deceitful with their process size. TSMC 5nm is more like 9nm. TSMC 7nm is more like 10-11nm as counted by anyone who isn't being deliberately deceitful trying to claim an edge).

There's absolutely no reason to believe Apple is just going to scale into the future infinitely, or has put the nail in the coffin of CISC/X86-64 (considering Tiger Lake 4 core parts are running only ~10% slower or less, and consuming hardly any more power, and thats with a "5nm" deficit (since Tiger Lake is 10nm). 8-core TL parts are going to make the M1 bite the curb American History X style. If/when power efficient Zen 3 hits laptops, the M1 wont be able to compete, as it *already loses* to Zen 2 based chips.

Re: scaling - Apple has already hit the wall of huge performance leaps. From The A-whatever to the A12, there were 30+% performance gains between generations. From A12 onward, its been more like 10%. The performance delta between the A12 and the A14X in the proto-Mini dev unit was like... ~12%. The M1 is based on that. There is no reason to believe that the M2 and/or whatever they call them is going to just suddenly jump another 40% in performance.

Nor am I poopooing Apple Silicon.

Its good. It really is.

But it isn't "dah bestest evarrr!!!"

Its just... really good. AMD and Intil WILL offer competitive products - the only question is WHEN, not IF.

And for doing "real work", until Apple gives some inkling of what a Pro machine will look like, AMD and Intel are the only game in town. And there's no particular reason to believe that Apple is just going to come out massively more powerful than something like, say, a 64 core Epyc CPU.

Will it be more energy efficient? Sure. Will it perform as well? Maybe. Definitely possible. But its not going to massively better. Thats just not a thing. Even its own performance metrics dont support that. And the power efficiency is a non-issue. No one gives a fuck if their workstation draws 1200W or 2000W. Efficiency matters purely for laptops and Appliance PCs like the Mini (and only for Mini because of heat dissipation).

And while we're at it, since this thread was about game performance:

In no world is the M1 a "gaming chip". Not remotely.

Its a good, power efficient laptop/appliance part that you can game on casually.

But iit is not for "Gaming" and never will be. The primary reason being that Apple doesnt give a fuck about PC gaming and never has. The fact that M1 can run iPad/iOS apps is all the gaming support Apple gives a fuck about. On top of that, RISC has serious power consumption issues at high clocks, and games are historically (and will continue being - almost 13 years in, "MOAR COARZ" has never materialized) tied to fast single core performance, even if they use multiple cores (because even multi core aware games only use 4--6 cores well, with very few exceptions) still need high clocks. And RISC is bad at that. IBM's POWER chips are still stuck at ~3.5ghz in practical reality (they can boost higher if their SMT is shut off, which is uh.... pointless) and thats 10 generations in.

Not everything can be massively paralellized.

Now, most things that people are actually use Macs for CAN be, so thats fine. M1 (and future AS) will be great for daily driving, productivity, and "work" applications all of which can be massively parallel. Which is great. Thats what Macs are for.

You dont seriously buy a Mac to game on. You just dont. And im saying that as a guy who daily drives a Mac and owns an iPad (and doesnt own an iPhone purely because of price and the inability customize my home screen with fucking SPACES BETWEEN ICONS, APPLE).

M1 is great for what it is. It shows much promise for future Apple machines. But it isn't for gaming, it wont be for gaming (ever), and it isn't some massive leap in technology that just put AMD and Intel out to pasture (since it is already not really more powerful than the competition, though it is more power efficient).

Particularly on the Workstation end and for "gaming".

Even if it were "merely" equal to the competition it still makes sense for Apple to use their own hardware because it reduces their costs and increases their profits and doesn't leave them at the mercy of someone elses development timeline.

I also find it amusing that idev is trashing on Chromebooks when ChromeOS devices outsell Macs by an order of magnitude and have completely destroyed Apple's near-monopoly on the education market in just 4-5 years.

For the average user, a Chromebook daily driver is just as capable as a MBA and generally speaking 50% to 75% cheaper for perfectly capable hardware.

Im currently typing this on a Lenovo Chromebook Duet (i bought it for my son, but since is is schooling from home im letting him use my Pixel Slate since it has better port selection and a larger screen, so im using this for the time being as my living room browser) and i can easily do .... 90+% of my daily driving that i'd be doing on my MBP on this with no perceptible performance difference. And this thing was 250$ out the door with a high-res touchscreen, including backplate/case with a kickstand (that just pops off via magnets) and keyboard/trackpad attachment.

[loadedaxe]

I have mine on preset level 5 for open world questing with shadows on fair. It averages about 50 fps. If I drop the scaling to 1080p it gets about 5-7 fps more. Addons may make a difference I have not tested it with out.

In Raids and BGs on preset 2 is where you have to be to have any acceptable decent experience and even then it lags in some areas.

I have the M1 Mini for one reason. Work, can it play? yes, is it awesome in gaming? No If the OP is buying the M1 Mini because of work needs, price, portability etc, then whether or not its a good buy, that is up to him. If I were spending ~$700-1000 to play wow on, I would definitely do something different.