I was a little surprised that they actually released an Apple Silicon version for it just a few months ago (https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-H...) in spite of its age.
Also Civ 6s target GPU is much faster than any of the M1s (which, despite the marketing, are still mobile CPU/GPU SoCs, not high clocked 100W+ TDP desktop CPUs with a separate 100W+ TDP GPU) so you won't see it use less than maximum what GPU (and CPU) can handle.
Don't mix performance profiles of games with performance profiles of bursty desktop browser software running Electron.
also how high do you think the penalty for running an intel binary is?
I can saturate all my 16 cores, on my workstation, the only result is that the turns are processed faster. When you play multiplayer, everyone is going to be pinned to the slowest person in the lobby.
Unless you VSync?
Eh? Civ 6 is a turn-based game with really very little in the way of animation. It's not a first person shooter rendering whole screens at 30fps.
Even leaving M1 aside, on my PC with a capable graphics card Civ 6 always thrashed the CPU a ton. I know there's a lot going on under the hood but I always suspected it was nowhere near as efficient as it could be.
Seems that others have pointed out that Civ is more CPU bound than GPU so I don't know if that's something that could be optimised without completely changing the mechanics of the game or if Civ is just an unoptimised beast but then again the M1 is way above the minimum required spec for Civ 6 so i don't think it's some unfeasible concept.
It's still super fun (I have over 1,000 hours played) but it's not something I would call a reliable or stable piece of software.
Porting it to a different CPU architecture sounds like a recipe for introducing even more bugs to an already unstable program.
Only downside is no mods and the mods give serious quality of life improvements.
I wonder how it affects mods, I might have to dive back in ...
I also note it's on the Mac App Store so that's probably why they're upgrading it.
Still, worth the buy at Steam for $2.
The Mac version is published by Aspyr that has rights to the source and to release updates. For example the Mac version is 64bit now. Windows version is 32bit thus heavily limited regarding mods.