OpenMW runs fine on Apple M1/Rosetta

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Bessarion
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OpenMW runs fine on Apple M1/Rosetta

Post by Bessarion »

Just an FYI for any other Mac users who were curious: OpenMW runs fine on the new ARM-based Macs via Rosetta 2. I'm getting 50-60 FPS in Balmora, which is the same performance I got from my Intel Mac -- which is admittedly an older 2016 model and was never top of the line. I'm running a pretty simple set of mods, the "I Heart Vanilla" list from Modding OpenMW.

It blows me away that any 3D game, even an old one like Morrowind, is playable through x86-to-ARM translation. I've only played a few minutes just to test basic functionality, and supposedly performance improves over time as Rosetta finishes a stored copy of the translated instructions.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: OpenMW runs fine on Apple M1/Rosetta

Post by AnyOldName3 »

I was under the impression the ARM-based Macs wouldn't have any OpenGL support, and OpenMW requires OpenGL. Is there an OpenGL implementation in Rosetta? If so, that's annoying as it means there is an OpenGL driver for those Macs, but you can't use it with native code.
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Bessarion
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Re: OpenMW runs fine on Apple M1/Rosetta

Post by Bessarion »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 19 Nov 2020, 01:58 I was under the impression the ARM-based Macs wouldn't have any OpenGL support, and OpenMW requires OpenGL. Is there an OpenGL implementation in Rosetta? If so, that's annoying as it means there is an OpenGL driver for those Macs, but you can't use it with native code.
OpenGL is deprecated on MacOS and has been for a few years, but as far as I know it's not impacted by Big Sur or ARM. I.e., it's supported natively, but still deprecated. I'm happy to test if OpenGL can be used natively if anyone can tell me how I'd do that!
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AnyOldName3
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Re: OpenMW runs fine on Apple M1/Rosetta

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Okay, Apple's documentation says:
OpenGL is deprecated, but is available on Apple silicon
Which is more or less the exact same state as it's been in on Intel-based Macs for the last few years. I'm glad they changed their mind about that, but I'm not too surprised as there's a lot of software out there like OpenMW that uses OpenGL on every OS, and if they were going to change, they'd be changing to Vulkan, not Metal.
Bubbline
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Re: OpenMW runs fine on Apple M1/Rosetta

Post by Bubbline »

Hey, I just wanted to say, I started playing Morrowind with OpenMW for the first time on a new M1 Macbook Air, but I'm pretty sure the lighting is broken (according to my gf who knows the game and found it weird). It's kinda glitchy depending on the camera angle, and indoors it usually gets extremely dark and really hard to see anything.

I managed to somewhat improve it by finding the video settings config file and increasing gamma (those settings are disabled on macs, but work by editing the config). Changing the contrast setting made it all go black, but increasing gamma a bit helped (though it was ugly). I've also had a bug where if I go far enough in a cave and later come back to the start (after having relaunched the game maybe, not sure) light sources are missing, as if they hadn't been loaded at all when relaunching the game or something.

So yeah for me it's been pretty hard to play, anything indoor is super dark. Outdoor is mostly ok but glitchy.

Here's an imgur album of screenshots with comments explaining the issue. I tried making a new thread but it got deleted after being approved for some reason...
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AnyOldName3
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Re: OpenMW runs fine on Apple M1/Rosetta

Post by AnyOldName3 »

As mentioned in that thread, it got hidden because you edited it, and the forum software doesn't trust that you're not just editing things to turn things into spam after they've got past a moderator.
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