Malcolm Owen
Players of "World of Warcraft" will be able to continue gaming on the new M1-equipped Macs, with Blizzard's latest patch adding native support for Apple Silicon.
In a post made to its community forums, Blizzard advised the 9.0.2 patch due this week for "World of Warcraft" will "run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than emulation via Rosetta."
Rosetta 2 is Apple's translation software to enable programs made for x86 architecture to function properly on the new M1 system-on-chip. Using Rosetta 2 will impact a program's performance, so shifting to native support frees up resources that can be put towards rendering the game at a higher frame rate or quality.
"We're pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon," Blizzard adds. The game company also warned that it is "highly aware of the nature of day one support with updates like this" and asks users to report any issues that may be related to Apple Silicon to its Mac technical support forum.
The announcement by Blizzard is encouraging for the gaming industry, as "World of Warcraft" continues to be one of the more important games being played today. The native support may encourage other developers to rework their games to do the same, instead of taking the small performance hit from Rosetta.
Blizzard's announcement follows similar moves by Pixelmator, Adobe, Parallels, and VMWare to support M1.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
23 Comments
Reputable developers will support ASi Macs sooner rather than later. This is starting to look like it will be a very successful transition.
Hopefully Blizzard ports more of its ~10 Mac games to M1 Mac. And it's probably asking too much, but if the games can run on M1, can they be ported to run on A14 (iPad) which also supports mice/keyboards? It's almost the same CPU as M1. I would point out that iOS now supports mice (one of which is required for most Blizzard desktop games.)
Look for native M1 Mac support coming for Fornite soon*!
*not soon
Hopefully the M1 will pay off for Warcraft. My 16-inch MBP is a good as Intel will ever be for MacOS, and my fans run like crazy even with graphics cranked way down in Warcraft.