Mac crashes -- possible solution?

[zenfrodo]

Posting this here, as other folks may be having similar issues.

I was encountering two different issues:

1) Game froze, entire Mac crashed & rebooted. This turned out to be related to my bluetooth connection to Creative Labs audio speakers; I disconnected the speakers & removed them from my bluetooth list (System Preferences>>Bluetooth), and the reboot issue has mostly gone away.

2) random game crashes for no apparent reason. Game would just quit, and I'd be staring at my desktop. This happened at odd times: when teleporting, when running around an area, just standing still. No apparent pattern to it, but it happened infrequently...until today.

An update came through on Sierra last night, updating the OS to 10.12.5, and when I tried the game today, the crashes made the game unplayable. They were constant. I tried lowering my graphics quality, turning off shadows, fixing permissions, resetting PRAM, nothing worked. What made this strange is that my husband also uses an iMac, about a year older than mine, with a slightly less powerful graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce, both of ours, though different series) , and he's never had a problem.

Until...I noticed him accessing an odd preferences panel, and asked what it was, and that ended up fixing the whole problem.

Evidently Mac uses its own graphics card drivers, not the latest NVIDIA ones, and the default system drivers don't like FFXIV too well. If you're having random crashes with no apparent cause -- ESPECIALLY if you just updated to Sierra 10.12.5 -- try updating the drivers. You have to download & install manually; the Mac update thing in System Prefs won't do it.

It's not as easy as it sounds. NVIDIA evidently likes hiding the Mac drivers and doesn't have them listed on their main driver-download page. If you google on "NVIDIA (driver name) MAC SIERRA (OS version number)", you'll get the correct page.

For those using NVIDIA GEFORCE on Sierra 10.12.5, you can get the latest drivers here: http://www.nvidia.com/download/drive...x/119315/en-us

Hope this helps!