OS X Total War: WARHAMMER III coming to Mac on May 5th

[TheGreatWumpus]

This isn't public yet it seems, but I got a press email from Feral announcing it, so it comes out tomorrow.

Most interesting part is that it seems to only run on Silicon Macs without Intel support? I saw no mention of it being a universal binary that has both Intel and Silicon.

"This initial macOS release of Total War: WARHAMMER III requires Apple Silicon. The game is officially supported on all Macs with an Apple M1 chip or better, as reflected in the game’s system requirements."

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

That cant be right, as they would rule out the vast majority of their customers.

Edit: Ah, saw your post on Insidemacgames, will go there instead.

 

[TheGreatWumpus]

Asked Feral directly by email:

"Intel Macs with an integrated Intel GPU will not be supported." was the reply.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

But does that rule out Intels with dGPUs?

 

[TheGreatWumpus]

But does that rule out Intels with dGPUs?

That was my first thought as well. Considering no average Mac comes with one by default, I would guess no.

 

[iAssimilated]

This is great news! I am a huge fan of Total War games, the Warhammer series not so much, but support for any Total War game (especially for Apple Silicon) is wonderful.

 

[Homy]

The Steam page also says only M1 and Monterey. The Apple Silicon gaming era has started.

 

[Janichsan]

Feral has answered some things about the game on Twitter, and there seem to be some issues.

First of all, the game is Apple Silicon only, but not Apple Silicon native:

It's Apple Silicon-only, but not native. The game uses a number of libraries for online multiplayer that do not support Apple Silicon, meaning we can't release it as an M1-native title. The good news is that it performs just as well via Rosetta 2 as it does when running natively.

A version for non-AS Macs is still planned:

There are performance issues on Macs with AMD GPUs that mean we cannot support them in this first release. We are currently working to add support for AMD GPUs.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

First of all, the game is Apple Silicon only, but not Apple Silicon native:

What a mess. So as soon as Apple is pulling the plug on Rosetta 2 support, this won't work anymore...

A version for non-AS Macs is still planned:

Wild guess, the crappy engine they're using is responsible for this. It's one of these decisions I don't get... the game doesn't even look really good, they could have pulled it off with the Unity engine, which would have made things much easier for them.

 

[diamond.g]

What a mess. So as soon as Apple is pulling the plug on Rosetta 2 support, this won't work anymore...

Wild guess, the crappy engine they're using is responsible for this. It's one of these decisions I don't get... the game doesn't even look really good, they could have pulled it off with the Unity engine, which would have made things much easier for them.

Could Feral port the game to an alternative engine? I don't see why creative assembly would bother with a "perfectly fine/working" engine.

 

[Janichsan]

Wild guess, the crappy engine they're using is responsible for this. It's one of these decisions I don't get... the game doesn't even look really good, they could have pulled it off with the Unity engine, which would have made things much easier for them.

Well, that wasn't really Feral's decision.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Could Feral port the game to an alternative engine? I don't see why creative assembly would bother with a "perfectly fine/working" engine.

Depends on their contract, but I can't see them do. They're certainly not paid for doing it.

Well, that wasn't really Feral's decision.

No it was CAs. Maybe Feral could have weighted in early on, but they didn't. But I wasn't referring to the macOS version specifically. The engine is a dud for any platform.

 

[diamond.g]

So no Mac benchmarks yet? Over in PC Land the Ultra preset seems to be quite excessive (not sure if unchecking unlimited memory makes a difference).

 

[TheGreatWumpus]

So no Mac benchmarks yet? Over in PC Land the Ultra preset seems to be quite excessive (not sure if unchecking unlimited memory makes a difference).

I’m waiting to get a copy. Don’t feel paying max price for what seems to be a generally poorly received game by the fans.

 

[Homy]

BIG DISCOVERY! Andrew Tsai discovered that in this case you have to have your Mac connected to the charger to get good frame rate. Only on battery there will be a 30 fps cap in the game:

 

[speedcat_feral]

BIG DISCOVERY! Andrew Tsai discovered that in this case you have to have your Mac connected to the charger to get good frame rate. Only on battery there will be a 30 fps cap in the game:

The framerate cap when not connected to mains power is an intended feature. This matches the behaviour of the original game on Windows, and has actually been a feature in Total War games for several years across both Mac and Windows laptops.

 

[Homy]

The framerate cap when not connected to mains power is an intended feature. This matches the behaviour of the original game on Windows, and has actually been a feature in Total War games for several years across both Mac and Windows laptops.

Thanks for the explanation! It would be good though to make a note about it or include it as a setting since it's an unusual feature on Mac otherwise where we all are used to get the same performance regardless of using battery or power adapter. As a long time Mac user I didn't know about this and I'm sure there are lots of new Mac users and Apple Silicon adopters that are unaware of it, since many have complained about it. There is a big risk that people try the game on their Macbooks and feel unhappy with the low frame rate with battery and ask for a refund without knowing that a power adapter would solve their problem.

 

[speedcat_feral]

Thanks for the explanation! It would be good though to make a note about it or include it as a setting since it's an unusual feature on Mac otherwise where we all are used to get the same performance regardless of using battery or power adapter. As a long time Mac user I didn't know about this and I'm sure there are lots of new Mac users and Apple Silicon adopters that are unaware of it, since many have complained about it. There is a big risk that people try the game on their Macbooks and feel unhappy with the low frame rate with battery and ask for a refund without knowing that a power adapter would solve their problem.

No problem - thanks for raising the question! We're now planing on adding an FAQ about this behaviour due to the recent interest in it. This has not been something that has been considered before (adaptive performance has been part of games and operating systems for many years without comment across both macOS and Windows), but we can see that an explanation as to why a framerate cap is implemented when using battery power would be useful.

 

[Homy]

No problem - thanks for raising the question! We're now planing on adding an FAQ about this behaviour due to the recent interest in it. This has not been something that has been considered before (adaptive performance has been part of games and operating systems for many years without comment across both macOS and Windows), but we can see that an explanation as to why a framerate cap is implemented when using battery power would be useful.

Great! Looking forward to your future Mac games.