M6 Mac Mini gaming: World of Warcraft Classic Anniversary
Stormwind, including 4K with and without MSAA. nyaaBench results on the 24GB M6 Mac Mini.
These tests use the 24GB M6 Mac Mini. See the overview and measurement notes for the shared setup.
World of Warcraft Classic Anniversary
Classic Anniversary was fairly uneventful, in the best sense. I stood in Stormwind with a reasonable number of other players around, tested Presets 1 and 10, then tried Preset 10 at 3840×2160 with 2× MSAA and with AA disabled.
It ran above 60fps across the board, even at 4K which you might expect. Despite this commonly being referred to as a '20 year old game', it does still benefit from better water shaders, SSAO, and shadowing not present in the original ~2005-2010 era release.
It wasn't until late 2010 with the release of Cataclysm that higher quality water was added to the game, along with shadow maps. Later again, in 2012 with the Mists of Pandaria expansion, the engine gained screen-space ambient occlusion, and greatly bumped ground clutter and draw distances. Nonetheless, the game as it is now lacks the level of detail to make playing classic WoW a problem, unless you plan to push beyond 4K.
WoW Classic Anniversary · Mac Mini M6, 24GB
| Settings / scene | Average FPS |
|---|---|
| Preset 1 Stormwind | 346.61 |
| Preset 10 Stormwind | 177.37 |
| Preset 10 3840x2160 2xMSAA | 62.87 |
| Preset 10 3840x2160 No AA | 72.5 |
One capture per setting. Hover averages for min / avg / max; min and max are one-second rates, not percentile lows. Colours: below 30 fps red, 30–59 yellow, 60–89 green, 90+ cyan.
nyaaBench capture
Standing in Stormwind with other players present. Player populations vary; resolution of the two non-4K runs was not recorded. Frame rate and latency are once-a-second summaries; telemetry is sampled every 250 ms. Dashed lines mark each capture's average.
The 4K captures average 62.87fps with 2× MSAA and 72.5fps without AA. I had no problems with the experience in these tests.