WoW Supported On New Intel Macs

If you were worried about your Azeroth fix on the new Intel Macs, worry not. Ars Technica reports that World of Warcraft is officially supported on Apple's newest toys. From the article: "What Blizzard did today was pop the cherry on Mac gaming with Intel inside Azeroth. Apple was cool enough to provide a prototype iMac, and Blizzard was cool enough to have been working overtime on the Intel version of Warcraft. WoW for Intel will be publicly available in about three weeks--for free! As if people wouldn't take a Krol Blade to their non-mousing arm in payment for a real FSB for 3D."

Comments

Needs a video upgrade

[DeadBugs]

It's a shame that they are using the X1600. It's one of the worst video cards of this generation. The iMacs would be better served with a 1800XL/XT or 7800GT/GTX.

Re:Let me just start off by saying

[Anonymous Coward]

The bandwidth of the G5 memory bus is pretty high as you've noted - however if you have a close look at any random fetch latency benchmarks, you'll soon find that the Intel chipsets score a lot better (as in, 80-90 on Intel vs 150-160 ns on G5). One can find access patterns that favor the G5 or the Intel; my assessment is that WoW has more of the latter.

Also, take note of the fact that G5 chips prior to the latest dual core parts in the PCIe towers, only have 512KB L2. The new Intel Core Duo has four times that amount. While shared amongst two cores in the Intel chip, it's pretty well known that WoW is only partially multithreaded, i.e. it will max out one CPU and use 10-20% of the other one.

Finally, be careful when comparing frequencies of buses - the G5 bus has 32 bits of read and 32 bits of write "pipe" clocked at 1GHz+ speed; the Intel part doesn't have such high frequency but has 64 bits of data path that is bidirectional. For code that is doing a steady stream of reads or writes, the available bandwidth is comparable. At max read throughput the G5 you cite can move 5GB/s up the read pipe; the Intel can hit 5.3GB/s. One can argue that the G5 can be reading and writing at the same time by virtue of its split pipes, alas, the DIMMS at the other end of the channel are not similarly endowed.

There must be some set of reasons why the iMac Core Duo is in fact outperforming G5 tower systems costing twice as much when running WoW; the factors above are likely to be significant.

Re:Linux support?

[netfunk]

Yes, because blizzard WANTS TO support all the distributions out there. I bet if there was only one Linux there would be WoW for it. It's not FUD to say that Linux is fractured among two main desktop environments, two major X11 implementations, and more distros than I can count. Mac OS X is supported because there is only one.

Oh, stop saying this. It didn't stop me from shipping Unreal Tournament 2004 without a single line of code that is Gnome, KDE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, or Suse (or whatever) specific. I figured (at least, I hoped) if there WERE issues in a given desktop or distro, the distro would make changes to support a popular game, but in practice, this never needed to happen. We used SDL (which is really the Gold Standard on Linux now, like DirectX would be on Windows), and OpenAL, which hid all sorts of other platform differences under the hood. Loki_setup handled installation across all distros for us, and we didn't worry about package managers.

UT2004 was probably my most popular endeavor, but there are lots of other games I've shipped with similar experiences.

People don't support Linux for a number of reasons, and while one of them is almost certainly the belief that Linux is terribly "fractured," in reality, it's not even remotely a problem...at least not in terms of shipping a game.

So stop spreading the belief.

--ryan.