Will the Fan in the Pro make a difference for gaming? (World of Warcraft)

[MuckrakerJG]

World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Shadowlands, releases November 23, six days after the M1 Macs come out. Yes, I know I could get something like the Asus G14 if I want a high end laptop for gaming, but I am getting the Mac because I need it for work first and foremost. But I would like to play WoW on the side.

When people say the Pro will be better under sustained load, I assume that means video editing and such, but I guess that would be for games too? I’m torn on what to do here, the Air benchmark that leaked looked super fast, but WoW will be running under Rosetta so not sure what the hit will be, or if the fan in the Pro is worth it for games.

Thoughts?

 

[dmccloud]

As of now, Shadowlands would be running as a Rosetta app as you stated, so the performance probably won't be as good as it is on an Intel-based Mac. Fortunately, Rosetta 2 recompiles the application upon installation rather than launch, so that should be better performance than the original Rosetta provided back in the day. The biggest advantage that the MBP would have over the Air is the active cooling. That means that not only might the Pro run at a higher base speed, but it can also run faster over a sustained timeframe compared to the Air and its passive cooling. If I was looking at one of the new Macs for gaming, I'd pick the Pro over the Air for the active cooling alone.

 

[Falhófnir]

Yes it basically means it can settle at a higher power draw/ clock speed than the Air. If the Air has to limit itself to 10W and (for e.g.) 2.5GHz sustained, the Pro might do 15W and 3.0GHz. How much of a real world difference remains to be seen, so wait and see what reviewers say if you're on the fence.

 

[SpitUK]

Plus the pro comes with the 8 core GPU as standard.

 

[Lord Hamsa]

Any sustained load, and that includes gaming, will do better with the Pro's thermals as opposed to the Air's. We'll have to wait for real-world tests, but I'd be willing to bet the Air's performance clocks in considerably lower than the Pro's after it's been running hard for several minutes.

 

[bwillwall]

I'm sorry to be blunt but everyone on this forum is purely speculating (talking out of their a**) until these machines have been tested. We don't know. The answer is likely yes, but we haven't seen these machines in the wild. The first GeekBench leaks basically gave the Air a better score than the Pro which is probably just a one-off. This also in no way says how they will perform with a load over an extended period of time. Give it a week and we'll know for certain what the difference is between the Air and the Pro.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

A fan will obviously help due to constant load. However wait for the reviews buddy

 

[StevenPrince]

The fan is definitely worth it, no ifs ands or buts, if you want to do any sustained loads like WoW gaming. I just ordered a 13 m1 MBP, and am really looking forward to playing WoW on it. An interview with a couple Apple VPs mentioned WoW by name and stated that it will run great on the m1 chip. I started a thread on the blizzard forums asking about compatibility, and someone posted that interview this morning. Once I saw it, I ordered lol.

My decision was between the Mac Mini and the MBP, mainly for the cost savings of the Mini, but ultimately portability and usability won out, MBP it was. The air has some fantastic benchmarks, but more and more scores are showing up on Geekbench, and the MBPs do have higher scores than the air and the mini, and the openCL scores are also higher, at around 19300. The fan is going to be huge for keeping things cool during long sessions.

I know my iPhone 11 Pro Max gets hot doing random things, I wouldn’t want to trust a passively cooled system with a game for any extended periods.

I don’t think you need to wait on real world reviews for an answer, go with the actively cooled, 8-cored GPU, MBP unit over the air.

 

[Lord Hamsa]

I'm sorry to be blunt but everyone on this forum is purely speculating (talking out of their a**) until these machines have been tested. We don't know. The answer is likely yes, but we haven't seen these machines in the wild. The first GeekBench leaks basically gave the Air a better score than the Pro which is probably just a one-off. This also in no way says how they will perform with a load over an extended period of time. Give it a week and we'll know for certain what the difference is between the Air and the Pro.

There's some element of common sense, though, to a large number of these comments. The laws of physics are still in effect, and heat management absolutely will affect how well the processor works. The only questions are how much is the effect, and what conditions are necessary to see those differences.

Real-world usage tests will give us a good picture of that once people start getting their devices, but until we get them, people are going to speculate.

 

[wyatterp]

I think no doubt, active cooling will be best - we see that dynamic in effect with the Tegra X1 in the Nintendo Switch. That same chipset existed in the Tegra K1 tablet from...gosh, what, 5 years ago?? The Tegra X1 actually had a working version of Borderlands 2 - but it ran...well very bad. However, on the switch, they are able to get it running above 30FPS the majority of the time because of active cooling on the exact same SoC.

Fast forward to 2018 - though, and before banned, you can actually run Fortnite at 120FPS on an ipad pro without active cooling. So we may be reaching a pivot point...my guess is that the base MBA M1 will handle iOS/iPad OS optimized games incredibly well, and likely with high framerates (think Apple arcade). I'm also hoping that some more PC centric titles will be able to run an optimized version at a stable 30FPS as well (Feral Interactive will have lots of work in it's future). We may see that the active cooled MBP or Mini can run at 60FPS over longer sessions. Further will be system ram - 8gb will run at 900P or less, and 16GB will run at 1080P.

 

[eckt0]

before banned, you can actually run Fortnite at 120FPS on an ipad pro without active cooling

This is really noteworthy and a good benchmark. The 2018 iPad Pro (A12) could run Fortnite at 120 fps without compromised graphics, so there's reason to believe a natively compiled World of Warcraft would run very well even on the fanless M1. I mean, WoW didn't run terribly on the 2020 i5 MacBook Air with G7 integrated graphics, and I think we can expect better performance here (even with Rosetta 2). Fortunately, some strings were datamined in July that mention an ARM64 build, so there's hope for a native version in the (hopefully near) future.

 

[grrrz]

you first have to assume the game would run at all; and without any glitches; which is not a given.

 

[Brammy]

I saw someone mention on the WoW Mac Tech support forums that Blizzard has started a test of of WoW on Apple Silicon. I also think an interview with some Apple VPs mentioned WoW running now with Rosetta 2.

 

[dmccloud]

I saw someone mention on the WoW Mac Tech support forums that Blizzard has started a test of of WoW on Apple Silicon. I also think an interview with some Apple VPs mentioned WoW running now with Rosetta 2.

This wouldn't surprise me in the least. While Overwatch never made its way over to the Mac, the Mac has played a role in Blizzard's history from the early days (pre-Warcraft 1.) I know that many Blizzard employees use Macs on a daily basis, and that is a big reason why so many of their games have been cross-platform since day one. I do know a few Blizzard employees through multiple channels, but they are not on the development side of the company. What will be interesting going forward will be how publishers such as Blizzard (and by extension Activision) handle Mac development going forward on Apple Silicon. Now I just need to get a hold of an M1 Mac to test how Shadowlands runs on it...