I have been testing SC2 on my new 16GB Memory, M1 Mac Mini and the FPS results are not as good as I expected.
I have tested with
- 3 different resolutions - 4K UHD 3840 x 2160, Full HD 1920 x 1080 and HD 1280 x 720 - against all the 5 graphics settings - using a 30 second late game battle sequence from MARU vs BYUN [TvT], ASUS ROG Online 2020 Grand Final.
Not sure if I am missing a particular setting that can boost FPS. Also please let me know if there is a better way to benchmark performance on Apple Silicon.
On December 27 2020 19:50 Cyro wrote: The M1 is an ARM processor and SC2 is built for x86, so it's non-native code. There can be huge performance hits from running like that.
So you need the 2020 Intel version. After that, Sc2 will have to be optimised which I doubt Blizzard would do.
Yea, unless you have some assembly language code (which would be very surprising), it's just a checkbox to recompile and build an x86/ARM fat binrary. I'd be surprised Blizzard don't do it soon or later for SC2.
On December 28 2020 02:11 krishpy wrote: I have captured the CPU and GPU usage in the video when I was testing. It looks like its GPU bound currently.
There was also plenty of free memory during the test runs.
Sorry did not have the time to watch the video yet. But it makes sens that it is GPU bound. In this case, I don't think we'll get that much from an ARM version unfortunately. If you check these benchmarks:
The BaseMark ones near the end, you can see the difference between the Rosetta (emulated x86 like SC2 is now) and native version. You get a bit, but not that much.
Yea, unless you have some assembly language code (which would be very surprising), it's just a checkbox to recompile and build an x86/ARM fat binrary. I'd be surprised Blizzard don't do it soon or later for SC2.
It's not quite that easy, you need to fix all of your unaligned pointer dereferences which were previously generally fine on x86.
Yea, unless you have some assembly language code (which would be very surprising), it's just a checkbox to recompile and build an x86/ARM fat binrary. I'd be surprised Blizzard don't do it soon or later for SC2.
It's not quite that easy, you need to fix all of your unaligned pointer dereferences which were previously generally fine on x86.
Could you elaborate on simpler terms if you have the time? I find this whole architecture discussion both interesting and confusing.
On December 27 2020 21:52 heqat wrote: Hopefully SC2 will be recompiled for ARM. It's not that much work really. WoW has arleady been ported.
WoW is still making Blizzard money while on the other hand...
Yeah... sc2 servers has been broken for 6 days now and it probably won't be fixed till the new years. If they don't dedicate resources to maintain, I doubt they'll spend resources to support recompile sc2.
Yea, unless you have some assembly language code (which would be very surprising), it's just a checkbox to recompile and build an x86/ARM fat binrary. I'd be surprised Blizzard don't do it soon or later for SC2.
It's not quite that easy, you need to fix all of your unaligned pointer dereferences which were previously generally fine on x86.
I guess it dedends of your code style. I have been working on cross-platform application for iOS and x86 for years and 99.99% of the code requires no change at all (and the changes were mostly due to some "hacky" code). Most of the code was pure C++ with pointers and all. But usually everything is already properly aligned in our case. I guess that if WoW was ported that fast, their code base should be clean enough to be simply re-compiled (with a few changes here and there).
On December 27 2020 21:52 heqat wrote: Hopefully SC2 will be recompiled for ARM. It's not that much work really. WoW has arleady been ported.
WoW is still making Blizzard money while on the other hand...
Yeah... sc2 servers has been broken for 6 days now and it probably won't be fixed till the new years. If they don't dedicate resources to maintain, I doubt they'll spend resources to support recompile sc2.
I wouldn't hold my breath it would be soon. I've never seen Blizzard mishandling their SC2 servers for that long since I started playing SC2 beta.
Only at 720/low does the CPU start coming into play as it hits 60-75 FPS and the GPU moves a little away from 100% utilization.
Odds are it won't run well, even with recompilation. 720/medium was chugging away at 28-35 FPS which isn't really playable. A small boost up to 40 FPS average would help, but not much.
You'd have better luck saving money until Apple releases a higher end apple silicon chip. They have an 8 core GPU atm, it'd probably have to scale up to 24-32 core before you could consider 1080/med settings.
EPT
