M6 Mac Mini gaming: World of Warcraft Forever Beta
Stationary Westfall benchmarks and the separate problem of movement stutter. 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 Forever Beta
Like many, I'm immensely excited about the World of Warcraft: Forever release, it answers the call myself and so many have been making for a long time and it feels that broadly the feedback is being listened to and the game continues to improve.
Recently Blizzard fixed a number of issues affecting Mac users mostly around shader issues with water and other materials rendering incorrectly. An issue where higher settings can cause major stutters during character movement. These captures were made standing still in Westfall at native 1920×1080, with other players filtering in and out, stepping through Presets 1 to 10. Several are very short, under ten seconds, so small differences between adjacent settings aren't especially meaningful.
1080p Westfall · Presets 1–10
Mac Mini M6, 24GB · stationary scene · frames per second
The game looks fine at all preset levels, but the quality jump from Preset 3 to Preset 4 is substantial.
nyaaBench capture
Stationary Westfall scene at native 1920×1080. Beta build; players enter and leave. These stationary captures do not measure movement stutter. Frame rate and latency are once-a-second summaries; telemetry is sampled every 250 ms. Dashed lines mark each capture's average.
Standing still, input lag felt low and the experience was smooth up to around Preset 7. The main problem was movement, as certain settings caused major lag spikes as I moved, something I didn't see at all at the lowest preset. It was still present at Preset 4 but substantially worse at the highest preset. The stationary captures of course don't measure this behaviour.
I also tried the HD character models at Preset 10 for a visual comparison and didn't notice a frame-rate difference. These figures describe the beta, rather than a promise about the final release.
Update: Secondary lighting at Fair
Further testing on 27 September narrowed down a useful workaround where leaving the game at Preset 10 but lowering secondary lighting to Fair stopped the major movement hitches. Many thanks to the feedback here! The video above shows the earlier behaviour before this adjustment.
I repeated Presets 1, 4, 7 and 10 at 1080p, 1440p and 4K with secondary lighting set to Fair throughout. These are modified presets, so I've kept the new results separate from the original 1–10 graph. They also stem from playing around Moonbrook although I tried to keep them consistent.
WoW Forever Beta · Secondary lighting: Fair · average FPS
| Preset | 1080p | 1440p | 4K |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preset 1 | 132.47 | 121.19 | 72.69 |
| Preset 4 | 136.14 | 102.41 | 57.05 |
| Preset 7 | 95.49 | 66.73 | 39.31 |
| Preset 10 | 41.7 | 26.22 | 19.03 |
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
Westfall scene with secondary lighting set to Fair at each preset. Modified presets; not directly comparable to the original default-preset captures. Player populations and capture conditions vary. Frame rate and latency are once-a-second summaries; telemetry is sampled every 250 ms. Dashed lines mark each capture's average.
Preset 7 looks great to me, and aside from secondary lighting I couldn't see major quality differences beyond it. Below Preset 4 the compromises are more apparent, with some decals popping in at short distances at Preset 1. With lighting at Fair, Preset 7 averages at 1080p and at 1440p.
At 4K, that falls to , while Preset 4 manages .