The Mac OS X Client's absymal performance is a joke.

I dropped another mail to SE support the other day, basically asking if the issue was being, or could be addressed. Saying I was happy to wait for a fix if one was coming, but would naturally want a refund if it wasn't. They got back to me this morning to say that their Dev team are working on the issue, but don't currently have a date for when it might be fixed.

Not really a surprise that they've not got / aren't willing to give a date, I sure as hell wouldn't want to do that either until I was pretty much done with the work, but it's good to know that it is being actively worked on.

FWIW I wouldn't read anything into the lack of date. I've spent too long working in tech to worry about that, and the support team are basically just going to be managing expectations more than anything else.

I left FFXIV for it's lack of Mac support, and been waiting for months for this to came out. And to my surprise, I felt like a second class. Why did I pay for a full game (including the original game which I paid for on Windows) and got a ½ ass virtual port?

I have a Mac running on i7 3770, 32GB RAM, GTx 980. Although I didn't expect the game ran as smooth as on Windows side, but it really disguised me to found out that I could only run on 1080 resolution with desktop normal setting, let's forget about high settings on any resolution. With my configs, I was expecting max out on a 4K monitor and still get 20 fps-ish.

This is simply appalling! Square might as well tell Mac users to keep their money and keep playing WoW.

What's conspicuously absent from Mr. Kasuga's post is that even though he talks about the possibility of a Metal renderer, there was no mention of doing a native client. The Mac client is just the Windows client with a wrapper. This where a lot of the performance problems lies. It's a strain to the think the performance gains you get by switching from OpenGL to Metal could possibly mitigate the overhead caused by the cider wrapper.

THE question is:

Is Square Enix intentioned to resolve OSX client performance?

I had faith...I was convinced maybe the complaints were coming from players with old MBPs....I downloaded the client this morning for my late 2012 iMac (Nvidia Gefore GTX 680M) and I'm getting an average of 20 FPS, full screen performance is abysmal, Shadows flash on and off the screen, simply panning the camera can result in a 10-15 FPS drop, Sound is tinny, textures are terrible (I feel like I'm playing on PS3).

I usually play in bootcamp and I average 60 FPS on the same machine with 0 problems.

I had high hopes because I recently moved Elite: Dangerous from bootcamp to OS X client and it runs beautifully. This wrapper is god awful.

I'm a huge fan of the game, but for SE to release this and charge $60 for it when its almost an industry-standard practice to release a true OS X client for free download to players with a PC client...it truly is a joke.

Refunds are in order.

Its so heartbreaking... i want to cry sometimes... you get these moments of beauty, where the client is full screen and looks so good, you actually begin to think that you are running a good port of the game. And then like a dog being slapped for going after a crumb of food off the table, the client goes wonky, fps drops to 9, the screen flashes oddly, people pop up, people pop out. i want this to work well on the Mac side, because in many ways its so close. The launcher works for me, the opening screen is just like the Windows side... logging in is pretty standard. What i am trying to say is it feels so close until you start to play it, and then your hopes are dashed. Please fix this!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Heghmoh

I had faith...I was convinced maybe the complaints were coming from players with old MBPs....
Refunds are in order.

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I get very inconsistent fps from 45-60 to as low as 9 fps. It's just all over the place and completely unacceptable. My mac is a 5k iMac with 32 GB of RAM, i7 4790k, and 4GB Radeon M295x. I'm still waiting for SE to give me something to justify the money I threw away on this client.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HapefullKorset

THE question is:

Is Square Enix intentioned to resolve OSX client performance?

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Yes, they're vested in the OS X client. It was a part of the announcement for Heavenwards, it's on the store, and on media for the game, Mac is is advertised. Will they rebuild the client in Metal? Probably not, they're probably committed to "throwing good money after bad" by fixing the Cider client.

They said that they were interested in adding directx 11 support since it might give better performance. They also seem to imply that they want to keep using a wrapper. I find it a little odd that they want to use a wrapper and give directx 11 support since I heard wrappers generally do not support it.

I am a little bothered that they don't support ps3 drivers for controllers since most mac games that have been ported do, and they got it wrapped from an outside company that wraps games for a living. My last comment is that it would be a great improvement if we could switch between full screen's by dragging with 4 fingers for the game. It would be a substantial benefit for the mac version for people who don't dual screens, since it makes it so easy to browse online while playing.

The PS3 controller works just fine on the Mac client for me. Straight plug n' play.

It is a shame that it doesn't support proper full screen. You can't activate Mission Control or swipe between full screen space with the game in full screen. You can only Command+Tab out.