“World of Warcraft Legion, the latest expansion to the biggest MMO out there, is finally available. It was released on August 30 for Mac and Windows and can be purchased directly through Battle.net,” Ric Molina reports for Mac Gamer HQ.
“Legion also introduces game-changing features, such as: New legendary Artifact weapons; New PvP-specific talents; A new world-scaling leveling system; And Class Order Halls,” Molina reports. “This is enough to make WoW Legion one of the most exciting Mac games this year. Nearly every system has been overhauled and critics so far are liking it. A lot.”
“I’m glad to confirm the first Mac game to support Metal is finally here. WoW now has a version that officially supports Metal and the improvements are impressive. With Count It, we measured both WoW using OpenGL and WoW using Metal and compared the result,” Molina reports. “The Metal version of WoW is over 60% faster than the older version.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Finally, a game that supports Apple’s Metal!
Sadly it still runs better when booted to Windows on the same GFX card. Metal is not quite there yet.
Maybe one day.. It may have something to do with Apple still using an old and outdated version of OpenGL.
Metal is a replacement for OpenGL, when you change your WoW settings, you switch it from OpenGL to Metal. Try again troll
So the article is stating it is 60% faster when comparing the older OpenGL version of WoW to the new Metal version of WoW on Macs. There does not seem to be any comparison of the Metal version of WoW on Mac vs OpenGL version on PC. Till that comes around there is no proof the Mac version has even met the level of support on PC. As Metal has stated perhaps Apple was still using an older version of OpenGL.
From my own test, it’s *really* close, but only on the latest hardware (not Mac Pro). An iMac 27″ 5K and a typical gaming PC both do very well. Cap your frame rate at 60fps, though, or your computer might get kind of hot…
I did. Direct X sadly still vastly outperforms anything apple has ever released..
Apple doesn’t really care though..
Unless you have the top of the line AMD GPU in your 4 year old Mac then it hardly makes a difference..
It does nothing on the Intel GPUs, except melt your hardware.
GTX960 here, its slightly better then OpenGL was. But DirectX on Windows blows it out of the water… Can do 60fps sort of stable on OSX with medium to ultra settings. Stable 100+ fps with everything on Ultra in Direct X.
Can’t say I’m surprised, DirectX has always been better (and games more optimized for it) so Windows being faster than Mac is no surprise.
Real question is, what would the difference be between Windows version and the old Mac OpenGL version?
Metal is Apple’s implementation of Vulkan, which is a low-level graphics API, much like DirectX.
Probably the first and last game to support Metal.
Blizzard’s Overwatch is not even avail for the Mac because of Apple’s disinterest. What a loss for Apple.
Are there any other successful 1st person shooters for Mac?
There’s quite a few, like the BioShock and Borderlands series or Team Fortress 2, etc.
There’s a few more listed here:
http://www.macgamerhq.com/guides/best-mac-games/
Yep, that was a shame but hopefully this good experience with Metal will motivate Blizzard to give Overwatch a go…