Apple Silicon

alterfenixeb17_ESO

Druachan wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

Great.

That report is fairly depressing. I can’t imagine that the porting is THAT difficult, it’s not like the system software is vastly different.

System and software API not but hardware is. Again on Intel based Macs we can have any AMD GPU we want either as internal one or external. In case of ARM Macs this future is still kind of a mystery if Nvidia or AMD will have any drivers while Apple for sure will not deliver drivers capable of running TESO using any other settings than low.

Example of WoW is also not a good one since it has much different requirements than TESO and it can run on Intel UHD just fine even with some better graphics settings while those new Macs as they are now already expected to be faster than UHD which made that decision simpler for sure. Sadly in case of TESO it is still a big unknown and just guessing if or when ARM-based Macs capable of running it well enough will be available (Macs other than Mac Pro or top tier iMacs as well that is). It can be next year, it can be year after it may never happen really.

Also one more thing to consider WoW - TESO does not use Metal natively which means it relies completely on MoltenVK in this matter. Perhaps not fault of ZoS to go another direction (we do not know all factors here) but still the fact is that WoW's engine could be more less prepared for it already for like those 2 years just because of that.

Other than that this was to be expected since June sadly.

Druachan wrote: »

Well there you go, sounds like it'll be stadia or whatever else comes along in the next few years. I have a MBP I bought last year so thats not being replaced for at least the next 3-4 years unless it really has to be (it blows up). To be honest the Mac support is pretty poor anyway.

They are not dumping Intel Macs. Announcement is only that there will be no ARM port. Also because of this gaming capabilities factor I suspect that most people that are playing on Macs will either switch to Windows ofc or they will wait at least til it is no longer an option to have new Intel Mac.

I never said they were, but they haven't really been supporting Macs for a while now, so they'll be looking for a way to drop the platform intel or not. give it a year.

Well that's what people've been saying for more than 2 years now that ZoS will drop Mac altogether soon. That soon lasts already 2 years and it would seem will last another one at least.

With that being said also keep in mind that current decision for all we know may be caused by the fact that ARM Macs are still one huge unknown in many ways like: how fast people will switch? What hardware this will be? How this will impact gaming on Macs? None of those questions have answers yet so no matter what for the time being this decision unfortunately seems to be the right one sadly. Again in case of WoW decision was easy as most likely eventual investment was low at this point. Should it appear in (i.e. within next year or so) that this is not investment as big as initially was estimated those decisions may change. After all this is all about 2 questions: How much it will cost? When investment will be returned?

alterfenixeb17_ESO

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

idk

I agree with @alterfenixeb17_ESO that Apple is mostly working to unify their ecosystem.

It will be interesting to see how much of the gaming world will port their games to Mac since they will be the smallest of what is now four platforms. Zos ceased adding meaningful content to ESO PC for a full year in order to get both consoles ready. It is not a small undertaking.

Calm_Fury

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

linuxlady

so the mac mini m1 runs on the graphics end, about as well an an rx 560x so it would be a downgrade in performance to my current desktop but way way smaller in form factor.

i think i'll wait to see what they do with the imac desktops and what processor they put into them. something beefier than the m1 by a magnitude of 3 would be needed i think...

Wolfster

ESO should continue to run under Rosetta 2 without any additional effort on ZOS’ part other than their existing updates to the client.

If other Intel Mac games are any indication, it will perform better on an ARM Mac via Rosetta 2 than it does on current Intel Mac hardware.

What we need is a pioneer with an ARM Mac who can run the client and let us know how it goes.

alterfenixeb17_ESO

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

alterfenixeb17_ESO

idk wrote: »

I agree with @alterfenixeb17_ESO that Apple is mostly working to unify their ecosystem.

It will be interesting to see how much of the gaming world will port their games to Mac since they will be the smallest of what is now four platforms. Zos ceased adding meaningful content to ESO PC for a full year in order to get both consoles ready. It is not a small undertaking.

Probbaly not much. At this point if we talk those alternatives to Windows then Linux PC may be better choice as there is at least Wine which works also much better on Linux than it does on Macs atm (I am myself using Crossover so not talking about this 32 bit apps thing).

Wolfster wrote: »

ESO should continue to run under Rosetta 2 without any additional effort on ZOS’ part other than their existing updates to the client.

If other Intel Mac games are any indication, it will perform better on an ARM Mac via Rosetta 2 than it does on current Intel Mac hardware.

What we need is a pioneer with an ARM Mac who can run the client and let us know how it goes.

This may be the truth but then we shall see. Also keep in mind that Rosetta is a software update which brings 2 topics:

- software translation of hardware instruction set is usually the biggest downgrade in performance. Metal is purely software solution from app API pov which means that all translation is done without relying i.e. on registers with MoltenVK mostly just passing Vulkan calls to Metal without any further alterations for most of it. In case of CPU such alterations will have to be done. Also keep in mind that instruction set of CPI is already a hardware thing which means it is called after all code optimizations are applied (different optimizations will work for different architectures)
- Another approach is by kind of app recompiling. This may be however kind of a tricky thing due to such tool having to guess what particular code on such low level is expected to do and when translating it performance may not be any objective (also corner cases in which translation without altering app behavior may not be possible at all).

soulferin

I strongly believe we can play ESO through Rosetta and no ARM support doesn't mean we can't launch game. Reason I'm concern is that ZOS said loud and clear they will just not care and won't try to improve. Thats why I can see future with more performance troubles by Rosetta or just random update 28 and here is my question for @ZOS_GinaBruno why I should pay for service if manufacture doesn't care about customers?

alterfenixeb17_ESO

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-mac-with-egpu-thunderbolt-peripheral.2266803/ - it's true indeed. Apple seems to be removing support for external GPUs. Now question is will they do that only on ARM or Intel Macs with future macOS releases too? Other than that unless Apple has something in preparation that can rival eGPU via Thunderbolt 3 I think it is safe to assume Macs are to become even worse gaming platform than they are now.

Seriously it would seem that the only 2 groups of users that Apple right now cares about are:
- iOS users that are not gamers (or console gaming is just enough for them)
- Final Cut Pro users

Logic Pro users can easily switch to other software such as Cubase or Reason unless they are some Apple die hards ofc. Which due to VSTs it may be good idea - Windows x64 support for most of those 3rd parties will not be impacted at all. Porting them to AS may be out of question on the other hand.

Other than that platform currently looks more and more limited sadly.

Calm_Fury

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

There are obviously dips on major cities and I don't run max settings. AA is off. Texture quality on medium. The resolution is 1600x900. It stills looks good enough (for me) and allows me to play without issues.

I get steady 40 FPS in instance contents, which is what I do most and matters to me. Most dungeons runs extremely smoothly now.

Before the "performance improvements" the same setup barely kept 20 FPS. I guess a lot of the focus for ZOS during the performance year was console, and I benefited as well because it improved this for lower specced hardware.

alterfenixeb17_ESO

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

There are obviously dips on major cities and I don't run max settings. AA is off. Texture quality on medium. The resolution is 1600x900. It stills looks good enough (for me) and allows me to play without issues.

I get steady 40 FPS in instance contents, which is what I do most and matters to me. Most dungeons runs extremely smoothly now.

Before the "performance improvements" the same setup barely kept 20 FPS. I guess a lot of the focus for ZOS during the performance year was console, and I benefited as well because it improved this for lower specced hardware.

So this is exactly what I was talking about. With any decent modern GPU you should be able to have 30 - 40 fps on medium settings in cities (and by modern I mean at least GTX 1000 so already dated products). Also keep in mind that this resolution is not even Full HD while truth being told in ear where more and more people talk about 8K some average gamer would expect at least QHD from any decent gaming computer sadly with having in mind that iMacs run natively in UHD even. Unfortunately anything below GTX 1000 is struggling with supporting it in current games even.

Also when you say performance improvements I assume you mean those that were followup to Murkmire failure? If yes then this was in fact more of a "make it working again" instead of "make it better" action regardless of GPU with as far as I remember even those Vega 56/64 having problems then. It is better to compare what settings someone could use before Murkmire with setup after those fixes.

If this is however about Bootcamp then it is true, those were just improvements but nevertheless what you are currently running it at is not what one would expect from any modern decent gaming computer. Yes, I know that TESO is not perfectly optimized but then actual graphics capabilities used for it are not using the most recent GPU capabilities either which means it is unlikely that well optimized game from 2020 with graphics similar or better than in here would run that much better.

Calm_Fury

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

There are obviously dips on major cities and I don't run max settings. AA is off. Texture quality on medium. The resolution is 1600x900. It stills looks good enough (for me) and allows me to play without issues.

I get steady 40 FPS in instance contents, which is what I do most and matters to me. Most dungeons runs extremely smoothly now.

Before the "performance improvements" the same setup barely kept 20 FPS. I guess a lot of the focus for ZOS during the performance year was console, and I benefited as well because it improved this for lower specced hardware.

So this is exactly what I was talking about. With any decent modern GPU you should be able to have 30 - 40 fps on medium settings in cities (and by modern I mean at least GTX 1000 so already dated products). Also keep in mind that this resolution is not even Full HD while truth being told in ear where more and more people talk about 8K some average gamer would expect at least QHD from any decent gaming computer sadly with having in mind that iMacs run natively in UHD even. Unfortunately anything below GTX 1000 is struggling with supporting it in current games even.

Also when you say performance improvements I assume you mean those that were followup to Murkmire failure? If yes then this was in fact more of a "make it working again" instead of "make it better" action regardless of GPU with as far as I remember even those Vega 56/64 having problems then. It is better to compare what settings someone could use before Murkmire with setup after those fixes.

If this is however about Bootcamp then it is true, those were just improvements but nevertheless what you are currently running it at is not what one would expect from any modern decent gaming computer. Yes, I know that TESO is not perfectly optimized but then actual graphics capabilities used for it are not using the most recent GPU capabilities either which means it is unlikely that well optimized game from 2020 with graphics similar or better than in here would run that much better.

I do not expect ESO to run in a 7 year old laptop as it runs on "modern decent computer".

Obviously it won't run at super high resolutions and max setings.

It stills runs good enough considering I would never even think about playing games on this Mac.

The whole point here is that the M1 chips running on laptops newer than mine might do a decent job of running ESO decently, with reasonable settings (not gaming PC settings) via Rosetta 2.

I believe it might run decent enough.

Wolfster

The M1 chips beat everything but the very top end of CPUs and GPUs on the market. They far exceed the performance of the minimum required hardware for ESO (benchmarks are out there, check out Anandtech).

There is a clear performance hit for Rosetta 2, however even considering that performance hit the fanless MacBook Air is outperforming the maxed out 16” Intel MacBook with whichever Radeon it ships with these days.

Remember these are the low power chips for the low power systems. The variant of the M1 (M1X or whatever name they end up using) will have less thermal constraint and support for greater quantities of unified memory as well as potentially faster and more numerous performance and graphics cores.

Performance on these machines is not an issue. The cheapest, lowest performing one far outstrips ESO’s requirements, even taking the interpretation layer into account. While there may be issues with specific games in specific circumstances there’s absolutely no indication that the performance of these machines will be inadequate. Quite the opposite.

alterfenixeb17_ESO

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

There are obviously dips on major cities and I don't run max settings. AA is off. Texture quality on medium. The resolution is 1600x900. It stills looks good enough (for me) and allows me to play without issues.

I get steady 40 FPS in instance contents, which is what I do most and matters to me. Most dungeons runs extremely smoothly now.

Before the "performance improvements" the same setup barely kept 20 FPS. I guess a lot of the focus for ZOS during the performance year was console, and I benefited as well because it improved this for lower specced hardware.

So this is exactly what I was talking about. With any decent modern GPU you should be able to have 30 - 40 fps on medium settings in cities (and by modern I mean at least GTX 1000 so already dated products). Also keep in mind that this resolution is not even Full HD while truth being told in ear where more and more people talk about 8K some average gamer would expect at least QHD from any decent gaming computer sadly with having in mind that iMacs run natively in UHD even. Unfortunately anything below GTX 1000 is struggling with supporting it in current games even.

Also when you say performance improvements I assume you mean those that were followup to Murkmire failure? If yes then this was in fact more of a "make it working again" instead of "make it better" action regardless of GPU with as far as I remember even those Vega 56/64 having problems then. It is better to compare what settings someone could use before Murkmire with setup after those fixes.

If this is however about Bootcamp then it is true, those were just improvements but nevertheless what you are currently running it at is not what one would expect from any modern decent gaming computer. Yes, I know that TESO is not perfectly optimized but then actual graphics capabilities used for it are not using the most recent GPU capabilities either which means it is unlikely that well optimized game from 2020 with graphics similar or better than in here would run that much better.

I do not expect ESO to run in a 7 year old laptop as it runs on "modern decent computer".

Obviously it won't run at super high resolutions and max setings.

It stills runs good enough considering I would never even think about playing games on this Mac.

The whole point here is that the M1 chips running on laptops newer than mine might do a decent job of running ESO decently, with reasonable settings (not gaming PC settings) via Rosetta 2.

I believe it might run decent enough.

Ofc not but that is not the point. point is hat Apple M1 will not be any good gaming platform sadly.

Wolfster wrote: »

The M1 chips beat everything but the very top end of CPUs and GPUs on the market. They far exceed the performance of the minimum required hardware for ESO (benchmarks are out there, check out Anandtech).

There is a clear performance hit for Rosetta 2, however even considering that performance hit the fanless MacBook Air is outperforming the maxed out 16” Intel MacBook with whichever Radeon it ships with these days.

Remember these are the low power chips for the low power systems. The variant of the M1 (M1X or whatever name they end up using) will have less thermal constraint and support for greater quantities of unified memory as well as potentially faster and more numerous performance and graphics cores.

Performance on these machines is not an issue. The cheapest, lowest performing one far outstrips ESO’s requirements, even taking the interpretation layer into account. While there may be issues with specific games in specific circumstances there’s absolutely no indication that the performance of these machines will be inadequate. Quite the opposite.

Yes, there are some: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 - it looks like old GeForces 1660 are outperforming it. Those are far from top hardware market has currently. Also check on those results below. This is coming from my system:

Vega 64 - 169 fps
Intel UHD - 14 fps

This is exactly same test as the one used for M1 and 1660 Ti. Also keep in mind that I did run it using Mac Mini and therefore had to use Thunderbolt - another 20 - 30% potential drop of performance. And this it GPU released in the middle of 2017 with basically any desktop GeForce RTX 30 series and at least half of 20 series outperforming it easily. Again sorry to say but Apple M1 is not designed for desktop gaming at all.

Wolfster

I’m not sure what point you think you’re making.

ESO runs more than adequately on a MBP with a Radeon Pro 455. All the benchmarks cited above prove that the M1 far outperforms that. So it’s very likely the M1 will adequately perform to run ESO even on Rosetta 2 (also borne out in the benchmarks).

Your assertion of what constitutes a gaming machine, or arbitrary performance expectation aren’t really relevant.

Therefore, unless someone here tries it and encounters an issue, there’s no reason to believe the game won’t run well on an M1 Mac. Nobody needs 160FPS to qualify their gaming machine.

Calm_Fury

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

There are obviously dips on major cities and I don't run max settings. AA is off. Texture quality on medium. The resolution is 1600x900. It stills looks good enough (for me) and allows me to play without issues.

I get steady 40 FPS in instance contents, which is what I do most and matters to me. Most dungeons runs extremely smoothly now.

Before the "performance improvements" the same setup barely kept 20 FPS. I guess a lot of the focus for ZOS during the performance year was console, and I benefited as well because it improved this for lower specced hardware.

So this is exactly what I was talking about. With any decent modern GPU you should be able to have 30 - 40 fps on medium settings in cities (and by modern I mean at least GTX 1000 so already dated products). Also keep in mind that this resolution is not even Full HD while truth being told in ear where more and more people talk about 8K some average gamer would expect at least QHD from any decent gaming computer sadly with having in mind that iMacs run natively in UHD even. Unfortunately anything below GTX 1000 is struggling with supporting it in current games even.

Also when you say performance improvements I assume you mean those that were followup to Murkmire failure? If yes then this was in fact more of a "make it working again" instead of "make it better" action regardless of GPU with as far as I remember even those Vega 56/64 having problems then. It is better to compare what settings someone could use before Murkmire with setup after those fixes.

If this is however about Bootcamp then it is true, those were just improvements but nevertheless what you are currently running it at is not what one would expect from any modern decent gaming computer. Yes, I know that TESO is not perfectly optimized but then actual graphics capabilities used for it are not using the most recent GPU capabilities either which means it is unlikely that well optimized game from 2020 with graphics similar or better than in here would run that much better.

I do not expect ESO to run in a 7 year old laptop as it runs on "modern decent computer".

Obviously it won't run at super high resolutions and max setings.

It stills runs good enough considering I would never even think about playing games on this Mac.

The whole point here is that the M1 chips running on laptops newer than mine might do a decent job of running ESO decently, with reasonable settings (not gaming PC settings) via Rosetta 2.

I believe it might run decent enough.

Ofc not but that is not the point. point is hat Apple M1 will not be any good gaming platform sadly.

Wolfster wrote: »

The M1 chips beat everything but the very top end of CPUs and GPUs on the market. They far exceed the performance of the minimum required hardware for ESO (benchmarks are out there, check out Anandtech).

There is a clear performance hit for Rosetta 2, however even considering that performance hit the fanless MacBook Air is outperforming the maxed out 16” Intel MacBook with whichever Radeon it ships with these days.

Remember these are the low power chips for the low power systems. The variant of the M1 (M1X or whatever name they end up using) will have less thermal constraint and support for greater quantities of unified memory as well as potentially faster and more numerous performance and graphics cores.

Performance on these machines is not an issue. The cheapest, lowest performing one far outstrips ESO’s requirements, even taking the interpretation layer into account. While there may be issues with specific games in specific circumstances there’s absolutely no indication that the performance of these machines will be inadequate. Quite the opposite.

Yes, there are some: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 - it looks like old GeForces 1660 are outperforming it. Those are far from top hardware market has currently. Also check on those results below. This is coming from my system:

Vega 64 - 169 fps
Intel UHD - 14 fps

This is exactly same test as the one used for M1 and 1660 Ti. Also keep in mind that I did run it using Mac Mini and therefore had to use Thunderbolt - another 20 - 30% potential drop of performance. And this it GPU released in the middle of 2017 with basically any desktop GeForce RTX 30 series and at least half of 20 series outperforming it easily. Again sorry to say but Apple M1 is not designed for desktop gaming at all.

I have no idea why you keep throwing this numbers and charts.

Nobody here expects a Mac to beat a top of the line, dedicated gaming PC with the most expensive graphic cards.

People that play games on Mac usually just do it because they don't want to invest in a gaming PC.

And just look at several reviews. People have been running Shadow of the Tomb Raider, on a Macbook Air, and getting 60 FPS. Via Rosetta 2.

This is just the first chip.

We will likely see much better M1X chips or something for the actual Pro machines, maybe even a M2 already for those.

If a first version, Macbook Air with no cooling and using Rosetta's 2 translation can run a game like Tomb Raider, I'm pretty sure ESO will run decently here and probably run pretty well when the Pro machines arrive next year.

Again, nobody here is expecting those Macs to beat a 3090 with liquid cooling PC all those fanciness that cost 5k just to run games.

I believe ESO would be perfectly playable in the next Apple Silicon chips via Roserra 2 with decent settings (considering ZOS won't support it and we don't get Bootcamp in the short term).

I still wouldn't buy an Apple Silicon Mac if I absolutely needed it to play ESO, but I don't think i will be impossible.

If only the Mac client wasn't so buggy...

BlueRaven

Apparently someone ran ESO on the M1 MacBook Pro. Spoiler alert, it reportedly runs really well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/jw0e5r/has_anyone_tested_eso_on_the_new_m1_macbooks/

Wolfster

@ZOS_GinaBruno I hate to be that guy but it might be a good idea to edit the post about ARM Macs on the front page of the website. Matt states that applications for Intel Macs don’t run on these machines but actually that’s wrong. In fact it’s somewhat misleading as any application written for an Intel Mac should run and the exceptions are bugs.

A small revision would make his comments accurate.

linuxlady

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple-mac-m1&num=1


8 gb ram and 256g gb ssd. more good info can be found in the comments as well...


after spending a couple of days to read through all the comments, it seems that the apple haters can be quite nasty there as well. In my 5th decade and i have never owned a mac pc and i am on my second apple phone, both of which are se models. the older being an iphone 6 like and this newer 2020 model which i bought for the camera abilities vs the comparably priced samsung phone which didnt seem to take pictures quite as good. So i am by no means a fan of apple, i'm just looking to buy what will suit my use case best. Up until this m1 chip was announced i thought about buying an apple tv for the 4k tv... but am stopping to pause to see if apple's new mac mini will game well enough to suit me, supply my usual internet activity, and port my ios games better than the tv os and use significantly less power than my 500w desktop which i have considered upgrading to the new amd xt graphics card (which would i think require a new motherboard, new faster system memory and a much newer 5 series cpu, and a bigger power supply as well i think and would cost me at least as much as a new mac mini with 16 gb of ram and a 1 tb ssd i have a ryzen 5 2400g apu and an rx 570 in this desktop at the moment) Then i would just wait another year or two and upgrade to a new desktop. I am happy with 1080p gaming. I have owned nvidia shields and they just cant do what apple tv does and they dont have the ecosystem of ios/tvos to draw from.. android tv apps are seriously lacking in number and have been diminishing for some time. Neither linux or windows has a device as capable as this m1 mac mini with the ecosystems to support them. A chrome box is the closest thing linux has and it pales in comparison and i couldnt play ESO on that at all.

Druachan

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

There are obviously dips on major cities and I don't run max settings. AA is off. Texture quality on medium. The resolution is 1600x900. It stills looks good enough (for me) and allows me to play without issues.

I get steady 40 FPS in instance contents, which is what I do most and matters to me. Most dungeons runs extremely smoothly now.

Before the "performance improvements" the same setup barely kept 20 FPS. I guess a lot of the focus for ZOS during the performance year was console, and I benefited as well because it improved this for lower specced hardware.

So this is exactly what I was talking about. With any decent modern GPU you should be able to have 30 - 40 fps on medium settings in cities (and by modern I mean at least GTX 1000 so already dated products). Also keep in mind that this resolution is not even Full HD while truth being told in ear where more and more people talk about 8K some average gamer would expect at least QHD from any decent gaming computer sadly with having in mind that iMacs run natively in UHD even. Unfortunately anything below GTX 1000 is struggling with supporting it in current games even.

Also when you say performance improvements I assume you mean those that were followup to Murkmire failure? If yes then this was in fact more of a "make it working again" instead of "make it better" action regardless of GPU with as far as I remember even those Vega 56/64 having problems then. It is better to compare what settings someone could use before Murkmire with setup after those fixes.

If this is however about Bootcamp then it is true, those were just improvements but nevertheless what you are currently running it at is not what one would expect from any modern decent gaming computer. Yes, I know that TESO is not perfectly optimized but then actual graphics capabilities used for it are not using the most recent GPU capabilities either which means it is unlikely that well optimized game from 2020 with graphics similar or better than in here would run that much better.

I do not expect ESO to run in a 7 year old laptop as it runs on "modern decent computer".

Obviously it won't run at super high resolutions and max setings.

It stills runs good enough considering I would never even think about playing games on this Mac.

The whole point here is that the M1 chips running on laptops newer than mine might do a decent job of running ESO decently, with reasonable settings (not gaming PC settings) via Rosetta 2.

I believe it might run decent enough.

Ofc not but that is not the point. point is hat Apple M1 will not be any good gaming platform sadly.

Wolfster wrote: »

The M1 chips beat everything but the very top end of CPUs and GPUs on the market. They far exceed the performance of the minimum required hardware for ESO (benchmarks are out there, check out Anandtech).

There is a clear performance hit for Rosetta 2, however even considering that performance hit the fanless MacBook Air is outperforming the maxed out 16” Intel MacBook with whichever Radeon it ships with these days.

Remember these are the low power chips for the low power systems. The variant of the M1 (M1X or whatever name they end up using) will have less thermal constraint and support for greater quantities of unified memory as well as potentially faster and more numerous performance and graphics cores.

Performance on these machines is not an issue. The cheapest, lowest performing one far outstrips ESO’s requirements, even taking the interpretation layer into account. While there may be issues with specific games in specific circumstances there’s absolutely no indication that the performance of these machines will be inadequate. Quite the opposite.

Yes, there are some: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 - it looks like old GeForces 1660 are outperforming it. Those are far from top hardware market has currently. Also check on those results below. This is coming from my system:

Vega 64 - 169 fps
Intel UHD - 14 fps

This is exactly same test as the one used for M1 and 1660 Ti. Also keep in mind that I did run it using Mac Mini and therefore had to use Thunderbolt - another 20 - 30% potential drop of performance. And this it GPU released in the middle of 2017 with basically any desktop GeForce RTX 30 series and at least half of 20 series outperforming it easily. Again sorry to say but Apple M1 is not designed for desktop gaming at all.

I have no idea why you keep throwing this numbers and charts.

Nobody here expects a Mac to beat a top of the line, dedicated gaming PC with the most expensive graphic cards.

People that play games on Mac usually just do it because they don't want to invest in a gaming PC.

And just look at several reviews. People have been running Shadow of the Tomb Raider, on a Macbook Air, and getting 60 FPS. Via Rosetta 2.

This is just the first chip.

We will likely see much better M1X chips or something for the actual Pro machines, maybe even a M2 already for those.

If a first version, Macbook Air with no cooling and using Rosetta's 2 translation can run a game like Tomb Raider, I'm pretty sure ESO will run decently here and probably run pretty well when the Pro machines arrive next year.

Again, nobody here is expecting those Macs to beat a 3090 with liquid cooling PC all those fanciness that cost 5k just to run games.

I believe ESO would be perfectly playable in the next Apple Silicon chips via Roserra 2 with decent settings (considering ZOS won't support it and we don't get Bootcamp in the short term).

I still wouldn't buy an Apple Silicon Mac if I absolutely needed it to play ESO, but I don't think i will be impossible.

If only the Mac client wasn't so buggy...

The issue is not that an M1 Mac can't run eso, the issue is that Zos are effectively saying that playing ESO on a Mac is on the way out. I have a MacBook Pro which is way way capable of running eso no problem, I have no intention of handing over more money to setup a "gaming pc" just so I can enjoy all the bugs and problems on windows as well. If I really want to carry on playing ESO I'd be better buying a playstation or xbox. If you absolutely have to play eso so badly, then its time to re-evaluate some life choices

linuxlady

Druachan wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

alterfenixeb17_ESO wrote: »

vithur wrote: »

New benchmarks show that the M1 should be very capable of running ESO even with Rosetta 2 with reasonable settings. If ESO runs in Rosetta 2

https://anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

To quote from this article:

So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default

Nobody here is questioning that it will rival, perhaps indeed successfully, Intel UHD. But this does not make it automatically capable of running anything else than average iOS game. Simple question can you run smoothly with at least stable 40 fps and some medium settings any game such as TESO, Doom or any other modern desktop game? No, you cannot. Doubling this "performance" will not really change much sadly - it still will be low end gaming machine.

Truth being told is that ofc for final judgment it would be best to wait for some comparison tests comparing this M1 integrated GPU with i.e. Radeon VII and how much slower M1 is in such comparison. Should it be able to render half of fps in such comparison then sure, this is going to be some average spec for modern gaming although even that will not last long as next year we're going to start getting Windows games requiring i.e 16 GB VRAM and like 32 GB RAM. Current Mac can handle it for sure. You can easily have 16 GB for GPU and up to 128 GB of RAM and you are good to go with this hardware. With M1? Not really.

So unless you are porting game that has relatively low requirements (such as WoW again really) those Macs so far are poor target platform for that. Perhaps in the future Apple will show something more capable but at this point all Apple seem to be after is unifying their ecosystem by brining iOS apps to Macs.

I play ESO on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro 15".

It runs on Windows on Bootcamp, but the current patch runs easily at 1080p and 50-60 FPS and a bunch of addons.

My Mac will soon be 7 years old. ZOS has done a lot of things wrong, but they did improve performance on resource-limited machines by A LOT.

I think ESO on Rosetta 2 will run a lot better than people expect. This is coming from someone who has only played ESO on this Mac and on the original VCR Xbox One (probably the worst hardware ESO actually runs on).

If only the Mac client weren't so bad...

Hardly really. First could you provide which areas have those 50 fps and what settings are you running?

I have currently two Macs:

iMac 2013 with GTX 775M and 24 GB RAM - used to be much better than those GT 750M with 775M performance being better than actually half of GTX 800 series. Resolution is QHD. On medium settings yes, there are areas in which it can run at around those 50 fps but just a visit to i.e. Solitude or Alinor (or even better - undaunted camps) changes it by alot. Also btw crashing (regardless of Markarth).

Mac mini 2018 with 32 GB RAM and external Vega 64. Ever since I bought it I am running in QHD and ultra settings without dropping below 35 - 40 fps in those most crowded areas. In fact in Cyro (which on iMac was a huge problem) I am having stable 40 - 50 fps regardless which patch and which fight. Also first time I have crashed in those one and a half year was after Markarth release. So sorry but currently Mac client from my experience is not in that bad shape and game is rather having more generic issues common to both Macs and PCs instead.

But enough of this showcase:-) It is true that they did but still point is that Vega 64 was top GPU over 3 years ago. Currently with even GeForce 2000 series (which is also a few years old already) and new Radeons it is just an average GPU for semi-casuals. Given that next year there will be new stuff with games trying to finally utilize i.e. GTX 3000 for real then whatever Apple comes up with but will have performance like no more than half of what such Vega 64 offers it will be considered as a gaming disaster. PCs in this area will be able to do everything that Macs can do plus so much more:-)

As for TESO in mind specifically keep in mind that with each chapter those requirements change. Given example of my 775M with game up to patch 3.0 everything could be run with something in between high and ultra settings with little issue outside of what PC gamers had anyway (so nothing worse than on PC). Then Morrowind came out which already resulted in fps drop. Summerset just followed that trend with Murkmire basically killing everything. Where btw it is true that performance even in those vanilla zones never went back to what it used to be before Murkmire but that is another topic. Bottom line is that there is a new chapter coming and those requirements will be revised one more time with this time those 6 -7 years old Macs being next in line for dropping (keep in mind that in the end those are still less performant computers for gaming than any high end PC of that era).

There are obviously dips on major cities and I don't run max settings. AA is off. Texture quality on medium. The resolution is 1600x900. It stills looks good enough (for me) and allows me to play without issues.

I get steady 40 FPS in instance contents, which is what I do most and matters to me. Most dungeons runs extremely smoothly now.

Before the "performance improvements" the same setup barely kept 20 FPS. I guess a lot of the focus for ZOS during the performance year was console, and I benefited as well because it improved this for lower specced hardware.

So this is exactly what I was talking about. With any decent modern GPU you should be able to have 30 - 40 fps on medium settings in cities (and by modern I mean at least GTX 1000 so already dated products). Also keep in mind that this resolution is not even Full HD while truth being told in ear where more and more people talk about 8K some average gamer would expect at least QHD from any decent gaming computer sadly with having in mind that iMacs run natively in UHD even. Unfortunately anything below GTX 1000 is struggling with supporting it in current games even.

Also when you say performance improvements I assume you mean those that were followup to Murkmire failure? If yes then this was in fact more of a "make it working again" instead of "make it better" action regardless of GPU with as far as I remember even those Vega 56/64 having problems then. It is better to compare what settings someone could use before Murkmire with setup after those fixes.

If this is however about Bootcamp then it is true, those were just improvements but nevertheless what you are currently running it at is not what one would expect from any modern decent gaming computer. Yes, I know that TESO is not perfectly optimized but then actual graphics capabilities used for it are not using the most recent GPU capabilities either which means it is unlikely that well optimized game from 2020 with graphics similar or better than in here would run that much better.

I do not expect ESO to run in a 7 year old laptop as it runs on "modern decent computer".

Obviously it won't run at super high resolutions and max setings.

It stills runs good enough considering I would never even think about playing games on this Mac.

The whole point here is that the M1 chips running on laptops newer than mine might do a decent job of running ESO decently, with reasonable settings (not gaming PC settings) via Rosetta 2.

I believe it might run decent enough.

Ofc not but that is not the point. point is hat Apple M1 will not be any good gaming platform sadly.

Wolfster wrote: »

The M1 chips beat everything but the very top end of CPUs and GPUs on the market. They far exceed the performance of the minimum required hardware for ESO (benchmarks are out there, check out Anandtech).

There is a clear performance hit for Rosetta 2, however even considering that performance hit the fanless MacBook Air is outperforming the maxed out 16” Intel MacBook with whichever Radeon it ships with these days.

Remember these are the low power chips for the low power systems. The variant of the M1 (M1X or whatever name they end up using) will have less thermal constraint and support for greater quantities of unified memory as well as potentially faster and more numerous performance and graphics cores.

Performance on these machines is not an issue. The cheapest, lowest performing one far outstrips ESO’s requirements, even taking the interpretation layer into account. While there may be issues with specific games in specific circumstances there’s absolutely no indication that the performance of these machines will be inadequate. Quite the opposite.

Yes, there are some: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 - it looks like old GeForces 1660 are outperforming it. Those are far from top hardware market has currently. Also check on those results below. This is coming from my system:

Vega 64 - 169 fps
Intel UHD - 14 fps

This is exactly same test as the one used for M1 and 1660 Ti. Also keep in mind that I did run it using Mac Mini and therefore had to use Thunderbolt - another 20 - 30% potential drop of performance. And this it GPU released in the middle of 2017 with basically any desktop GeForce RTX 30 series and at least half of 20 series outperforming it easily. Again sorry to say but Apple M1 is not designed for desktop gaming at all.

I have no idea why you keep throwing this numbers and charts.

Nobody here expects a Mac to beat a top of the line, dedicated gaming PC with the most expensive graphic cards.

People that play games on Mac usually just do it because they don't want to invest in a gaming PC.

And just look at several reviews. People have been running Shadow of the Tomb Raider, on a Macbook Air, and getting 60 FPS. Via Rosetta 2.

This is just the first chip.

We will likely see much better M1X chips or something for the actual Pro machines, maybe even a M2 already for those.

If a first version, Macbook Air with no cooling and using Rosetta's 2 translation can run a game like Tomb Raider, I'm pretty sure ESO will run decently here and probably run pretty well when the Pro machines arrive next year.

Again, nobody here is expecting those Macs to beat a 3090 with liquid cooling PC all those fanciness that cost 5k just to run games.

I believe ESO would be perfectly playable in the next Apple Silicon chips via Roserra 2 with decent settings (considering ZOS won't support it and we don't get Bootcamp in the short term).

I still wouldn't buy an Apple Silicon Mac if I absolutely needed it to play ESO, but I don't think i will be impossible.

If only the Mac client wasn't so buggy...

The issue is not that an M1 Mac can't run eso, the issue is that Zos are effectively saying that playing ESO on a Mac is on the way out. I have a MacBook Pro which is way way capable of running eso no problem, I have no intention of handing over more money to setup a "gaming pc" just so I can enjoy all the bugs and problems on windows as well. If I really want to carry on playing ESO I'd be better buying a playstation or xbox. If you absolutely have to play eso so badly, then its time to re-evaluate some life choices

The current reviews show it playing well through rosetta and crossover is in the works. the new m1 overpowers your pro machine in performance and who said anything about playing it so badly. people here just want to play it at all... and there is no official word about dropping mac support so please stop spreading rumors. ty and have a nice day.

BlueRaven

I posted this in another forum thread, but I thought I should repost it here.

I found this Google docs spreadsheet about Mac games on the Apple M1 chips.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/edit#gid=0

Running ESO on a MacBook Air M1 (The one without a cooling fan), with 16GB through steam;

1440x990 - 60FPS on medium settings
1440x990 - 30FPS on high settings

Both of which are better than my iMac.

Calm_Fury

BlueRaven wrote: »

I posted this in another forum thread, but I thought I should repost it here.

I found this Google docs spreadsheet about Mac games on the Apple M1 chips.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/edit#gid=0

Running ESO on a MacBook Air M1 (The one without a cooling fan), with 16GB through steam;

1440x990 - 60FPS on medium settings
1440x990 - 30FPS on high settings

Both of which are better than my iMac.

THat is what most of us that don't expect high end gaming-PC performance were waiting for.

I guess now the issue is just for how long Apple will support Rosetta 2.

Based on the fact that whey won't conclude the transaction until 2022 (which means they will sell Intel Macs until them), I'm pretty sure playing ESO via Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs will be viable for 4-5 years.

BlueRaven

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

Well the original Rosetta lasted about six years. So that should be a good rule of thumb for Rosetta 2.

Calm_Fury

BlueRaven wrote: »

I posted this in another forum thread, but I thought I should repost it here.

I found this Google docs spreadsheet about Mac games on the Apple M1 chips.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/edit#gid=0

Running on a MacBook Air M1 (The one without a cooling fan), with 16GB through steam;

1440x990 - 60FPS on medium settings
1440x990 - 30FPS on high settings

Both of which are better than my iMac.

You already posted that here, hehe (I know, we had 4 or 5 different threads about the same subject).

BlueRaven

Calm_Fury wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

I posted this in another forum thread, but I thought I should repost it here.

I found this Google docs spreadsheet about Mac games on the Apple M1 chips.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/edit#gid=0

Running on a MacBook Air M1 (The one without a cooling fan), with 16GB through steam;

1440x990 - 60FPS on medium settings
1440x990 - 30FPS on high settings

Both of which are better than my iMac.

You already posted that here, hehe (I know, we had 4 or 5 different threads about the same subject).

Yeah I messed up. For some reason it saved the draft and I hit post by mistake. But I fixed it. :-/

linuxlady

BlueRaven wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

I posted this in another forum thread, but I thought I should repost it here.

I found this Google docs spreadsheet about Mac games on the Apple M1 chips.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/edit#gid=0

Running on a MacBook Air M1 (The one without a cooling fan), with 16GB through steam;

1440x990 - 60FPS on medium settings
1440x990 - 30FPS on high settings

Both of which are better than my iMac.

You already posted that here, hehe (I know, we had 4 or 5 different threads about the same subject).

Yeah I messed up. For some reason it saved the draft and I hit post by mistake. But I fixed it. :-/

post them as often as needed i say because it seems they were sometimes not observed

Calm_Fury

BlueRaven wrote: »

Calm_Fury wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

I posted this in another forum thread, but I thought I should repost it here.

I found this Google docs spreadsheet about Mac games on the Apple M1 chips.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/edit#gid=0

Running on a MacBook Air M1 (The one without a cooling fan), with 16GB through steam;

1440x990 - 60FPS on medium settings
1440x990 - 30FPS on high settings

Both of which are better than my iMac.

You already posted that here, hehe (I know, we had 4 or 5 different threads about the same subject).

Yeah I messed up. For some reason it saved the draft and I hit post by mistake. But I fixed it. :-/

No worries. That draft feature has tripped me a few times as well.

Wolfster

Calm_Fury wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

I posted this in another forum thread, but I thought I should repost it here.

I found this Google docs spreadsheet about Mac games on the Apple M1 chips.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/edit#gid=0

Running ESO on a MacBook Air M1 (The one without a cooling fan), with 16GB through steam;

1440x990 - 60FPS on medium settings
1440x990 - 30FPS on high settings

Both of which are better than my iMac.

THat is what most of us that don't expect high end gaming-PC performance were waiting for.

I guess now the issue is just for how long Apple will support Rosetta 2.

Based on the fact that whey won't conclude the transaction until 2022 (which means they will sell Intel Macs until them), I'm pretty sure playing ESO via Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs will be viable for 4-5 years.

You can answer some of this just by looking at Apple's policies. Models are demoted to 'vintage' at about 5 years from their release, and this means they aren't guaranteed to get new versions of the OS anymore but are still supported. They tend to become obsolete at 7 years (the point where you can't take them to Apple for repairs anymore because they don't produce the parts anymore).

Apple will support Rosetta 2 for at least 7 years from the point they stop selling Intel Macs. Rosetta 2 will continue to work on those macs until something (the software you're trying to run) introduces a breaking change.