Issue refunds for the MacOS client.

[MsQi]

It runs fine for me so far.

[Paladinleeds]

I have a Surface Book 2 with the Nvidia 1060 and I've been able to run Ridorana Lighthouse on that thing without lag. Cost me a pretty penny, but that thing runs like silk as long as the ambient temperature isn't too hot. (We live in Georgia. I don't get to game on it outdoors.)

Aha, I use a 1080 in my desktop. Need more than a 1060 I'd reckon for a new gaming laptop, probably a 1070. I'd be doing VR as well as FFXIV. So I'd need the extra oomph.

Though for me, gaming outside, I can't do it either, the thing would get frazzled by water. I live in rainy UK (this heatwave is not normal weather). I'd need to be in a covered area (very well covered, with how frantic our rain is)

[Avenger]

If it's any consolation, it used to be a lot worse, like dropping to 5 FPS - basically unplayable; character models with missing polygons, or just invisible. In fact they did offer refunds and stopped selling it for a while while they worked on improving the terrible performance and fixing some of the bugs! I held on to my copy in the hope that they would eventually fix the performance and make it at least semi-playable.

Now it is marginal but I find it to be playable (if you have a discrete GPU at least) and it's nice to not have to reboot into Windows. It's not great but I've made it through 24p raids and hunts. Haven't tried Eureka though - that might be a disaster!

But if you want double the FPS, yeah, use Boot Camp to run the Windows version. Works great.

p.s. I wish SE would optimize FFXIV on macOS the way they have optimized their iOS games. Clearly they have access to programmers who can use Apple's Metal API effectively, but as people have noted the FFXIV client is just the Windows version running on top of a middleware layer that seems to translate DirectX into deprecated, low-performance OpenGL. It's possible that this library will be upgraded to use Metal though, so it might get slightly better at some point.

p.p.s. Given the lousy performance and the fact that it's just the Windows client running on middleware, it's too bad that you have to buy another copy not just of the game but of all the expansions, only to find out that it doesn't work great on macOS so you have to buy the Windows client and expansions too! I think there's a good argument for Win-mac cross-buy at the very least.

[reiichi]

Metal isn't really gonna help the mac client. At least not unless wine can make use of it, in which case, it'll help users who still aren't using the official mac client. SE could probably get much better performance on macs if they were willing to recode the client in full using mac/linux-friendly APIs instead of relying on wine or proprietary versions of wine (usually outdated) to handle all the windows-only bits, especially directx code.

But that would be a pretty monumental task for something they probably wouldn't profit on. Even assuming they could reuse as much as possible given that the ps4 runs on a BSD offshoot as well. But even then, supporting a variety of hardware isn't really pretty. Maybe if they'd used OpenGL instead of directx?

[EvalcieChevallier]

Patch 4.3 rendered the game unplayable on my Mac, without explanation until SE CS said "upgrade to High Sierra" and yet when I bootcamp into Windows the Windows client plays FLAWLESSLY so this just feels like laziness on the Mac wrapper team. What's the point of continuing a Mac client if you're going to ignore it half the time?

[SinisterJoints]

Why would you game on a Mac? Media has always been what mac is good at, not games... like ever? SO why in the world would you think that has changed? lol

[Sebazy]

Why would you game on a Mac? Media has always been what mac is good at, not games... like ever? SO why in the world would you think that has changed? lol

Why in the world would you post this seemingly without the first clue about what the issue is here?

If FFXIV’s Apple client was a native mac app using the Metal API (like WoW for example) then this wouldn’t be a discussion.

If FFXIV’s Apple client was free, I suspect the majority would shrug and accept it for what it is.

It’s horrible performance isn’t a Mac problem, it’s a lazy outsourced job problem. It needs to either be considerably better, or it needs to be free for existing subscribers.

[misterbones]

Setting up wine myself and playing ffxiv with wine-csmt I get more fps than the port.
Ridiculous.

[misterbones]

Right? I just get canned responses, myself. I actually cannot play without constant kernel panics unless i am on 10.12.4 but they do still occur.

[misterbones]

I think there are really fast apis for translating direct x11 to vulkan/metal