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

Saw it at MacWorld

[jcr]

Rob from Blizzard was there, manning the little WoW booth in the Apple Design Awards winner's area. He had WoW running on one of the new iMacs, and it looked awfully smooth to me. I didn't ask him what kind of frame rates he was actually seeing, though.

-jcr

Let me just start off by saying

[Johnny Mnemonic]

As if people wouldn't take a Krol Blade to their non-mousing arm in payment for a real FSB for 3D

Thanks for paying attention, but the G5 FSB kicks, has kicked, and still kicks the Intel FSB ass. The high end G5 sports a 1.25 Ghz bus per CPU; and even the iMac G5 had a 667 Mhz bus. So the only real advancement in this regard is on the lousy bus of the PowerBook. So big deal.

It is nice that WoW has announced for the IntelliMac, but going to Intel isn't going to change everything overnight because the G5 didn't really suck that bad.

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.

I can see it now

[Xeirxes]

...a new generation of Slashdot. Gone is "Will it run Linux?" and here to stay is, "Will it run WoW?"

Pop the cherry?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Blizzard did today was pop the cherry on Mac gaming with Intel inside Azeroth.

This is World of Warcraft we're talking about here. Owning this game would seem to preclude any actual cherry popping from taking place...

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:Needs a video upgrade

[Babbster]

I just resisted the temptation to get very snarky. No applause, please; the warm feeling inside is enough.

Anyway, you're talking about top-of-the-line video cards, cards that are $300 to $500 when they're NOT sold by a company that places a premium on style and raises their prices accordingly. It's also worth noting that the x1600 chipset is going to run cooler than those you mentioned, which is vital for a small all-in-one (even the power supply is in there - no outboard brick) unit.

Anyone who buys an iMac knows that they're not getting a gaming powerhouse. If someone wanted a top-flight gaming PC s/he would buy an x86 system with a serious graphics card or, if a Mac aficionado, a PowerMac - perhaps holding off until the Intel chips get in the latter, on the off-chance that running Windows and getting THAT gaming goodness would be possible.

Pure evil

[Anonymous Coward]

All I can say is damn you Apple and damn you Blizzard! I'm never going to get off this game!

Re:No PPC or x86 Mac client

[Psykechan]

Yeah, feel free to suggest Guild Wars. I'm sure it's the best thing since sliced toast but until they have a Mac client, I can't play the game. I even inquired about it when it launched asking if I purchased the Windows version and if a Mac version came out, would I be entitled to download it. The result was a rather insulting form letter.

WoW is supported on Windows, PPC Mac, and now x86 Mac. Can you guess why WoW has a huge Mac following and GW does not?

I'll give you a moment to think about your answer.

Re:Waste Of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Well,

I can state with confidence that this is not the case (re money changing hands for a PR stunt). Blizzard is supporting Intel Mac with WoW because our Mac players want it.

In fact, at the start of Macworld we had the Intel binary handy but no hardware to show it on, we had a G5 tower in the booth. After some discussions with Apple staff here and there, we were able to arrange the Intel demo over by the gaming area. It worked out very well and the vast majority of players that subsequently test drove it, were highly satisfied with the performance and stability shown on the new iMac.

We started working on WoW for Intel Mac at the time of the WWDC announcement in June 2005, in order to be prepared for the new hardware's inevitable arrival. The upcoming 1.9.3 patch will contain the first end user shipment of that work in the form of the new universal-binary executable.

Linux support?

[StonedRat]

So, if WoW runs on a unix system on an intel cpu, how much work would it be to get it running on linux?

Re:Linux support?

[lowmagnet]

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.

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.

NSFW?

[/dev/trash]

Pop a cherry? Sexist pig.

Re:"Free"?

[drmarcj]

At $15 a month to play online, it's anything but 'free'! It's never been clear to me why they don't give away every copy in the first place.

No Support = Something Against, why?

[AHumbleOpinion]

I really not see a reason why Blizzard cannt/wont port games like WoW and WC3 to Linux.

Why do you think Blizzard has something against Linux? It may simply be a sound business decision. Even id has said that supporting Linux clients do not make business sense, they just do it because they think it is cool [old Game Developer Magazine interview].

It is really that Linux gamers offer Blizzard very little. Linux gamers generally dual boot or emulate, so they are already customers. Offering a Linux version would generally not produce a new sale, it would replace a Windows sale with a Linux sale, there is no new money to pay for development and QA costs.

If anything is programmed right it will work fine on Linux, Mac, and Windows without much change in the code. This new version for Mac should work fine on Linux, they probably just need to recompile it.

Things are far more complicated than you suggest. For now I'll just say that Mac OS X apps are not written to some "unix api", they are written to Apple proprietary APIs, carbon or coacoa. Mac ports in general get you closer to Linux than Windows-only games, OpenGL is required and things like DirectPlay networking are avoided, but this is true whether the Mac target is PowerPC or Intel. The new Intel Macs have not changed anything.

Re:What Does Blizzard Have Against Linux?

[BenjyD]

While I imagine their codebase is reasonably portable, it is still going to be a lot more than just a recompile to get a game to Linux. All the system level stuff (input, sound etc) would have to be redone, probably using SDL. Then they have to test, develop an installer, distribute etc.
Given that cost, the size of the intersection of Linux users who want to play WoW, have a fast enough computer, have a supported 3D card and can get the drivers installed, don't already have a Windows/Mac install and would be prepared to pay for it is probably far too small for Blizzard to bother.