Reports on Starcraft 2 crashing Mac’s runnning Nvidia graphics processor units (GPU) is nothing new but lately this has exploded with the introduction of Blizzard’s latest Legacy of the Void installment of the Starcraft 2 universe.
The most common crash occurs mid-grame.
You’re playing on the edge of your seat, suddenly there is a bright flash of white light (you cuss), your game is swallowed by a dark screen, followed by your Mac’s startup chime. By now, you’re sitting staring blankly at your Mac’s kernal panic message atop a grey background screen. Telling you that your Mac just crashed because of a “problem”.
If this sounds disturbingly familiar we regret to inform you that at the moment there does not appear to be any resolution.
There are three parties who can potentially ‘solve’ this; Apple who built the Mac. Nvidia who supplied Apple the GPU and finally, Blizzard who produced the game.
None of which are responding or appear the least bothered to assist in this.
We tested the crashing and confirmed that this definitely affects the 15″ Macbook Pro (Mid 2010) which ships with an integrated Intel HD Graphics 288MB and a discrete Nvidia GT330M 512MB GPU.
We then tested Starcraft 2 Legacy of the Void on a Mac Mini (Late 2012) which ships with a meagre Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536MB GPU and surprisingly the game runs fine! No crash. Hang. Nothing.
It has to be noted that other than Starcraft 2 Legacy of the Void, nothing else crashes the Nvidia equipped 15″ Macbook Pro.
Based on this we are led to conclude that the most likely culprit who can resolve this is Blizzard.
This is excerbated by the fact that prior to the introduction of Legacy of the Void, previous iterations of Stracraft 2 seemed to run absolutely fine.
There is a strong suspicion that the newest iteration of Starcraft 2 from Blizzard must have coding in it that causes Nvidia equipped Macs to simply violently, crash.
Legacy of the Void was officially released on 25 November 2015 and since then till now, no resolution has been forthcoming.
Unfortunately Blizzard cannot be contacted for comment and they are not the ‘customer friendliest’ game producer as they provide nothing other than a public forum to address their customer’s needs.
Even if you attempt to follow Blizzard’s web site’s “Support” links it will eventually lead you back to the public forum where you, like most others before you, will likely end up leaving nothing more productive than a rant against Blizzard.
If anyone in Blizzard even remotely cares about their loyal customer base, it is hoped that something is done to address this nagging issue.
Yesterday.