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

[Distressedbagel]

Sent in my request for a refund. I'd be glad to purchase it again if there is ever a definite fix.

[KisaiTenshi]

The performance of the client is, as stated by those above me, completely unacceptable for a product that costs $60. I would understand if it was a native port, but it's simply utilizing Transgaming's Cider.
.

D:

If they were going to do such a poor job on it, SE should ask for their money back and just do a native OS X port in-house. It shouldn't be that much more effort than maintaining a PS3/PS4 and PC version.

If people are getting such poor performance as they say they are, Parallels would even be faster.

[JavateHut]

Ok everyone I have some news directly from the phone support! So I had to hunt to find this number which is Square Enix's base support in CA (858) 790-7529 in case you want to call it yourself but be warned I waited for 2 hours in line then talked to the rep for another hour problem solving. The "reason" the game will not run on my mac pro is apparently because I have the game installed to a solid state drive /rollseyes, which seems backwards but the rep assured me they have had issues with their games in the past when installed on a solid state hard drive because of the way it writes data. So next i gave him the specs on my wife's iMac 5k which is maxed out but running the standard hard drive) and they claimed the problem was with the fact her operating system was only 10.10.1 and not 10.10.2 /facepalm. So I updated to the newest 10.10.3 and ran the game with him on the phone and alas not much improvement. I will say there definitely was some improvement in that is was less stuttery but it still would be very difficult to play in an actual instanced encounter I would imagine. Mainly because I was getting 15-25 fps just in town with no combat. He then told me they cannot directly handle the refunds since they are not attached to the square enix online support which is the email support link that was linked earlier.

He also told me they are receiving a FLOOD of calls regarding mac problems and several thousand emails per day. He confirmed they are aware there is an issue with the mac product and they are working hard to try to fix it as fast as possible but they pretty much still had no idea what the actual problem was. So theres something I guess, I suppose I will install the game to my non solid state hard drive and see if that really makes a difference... Why not I guess... I shall report back with my findings

[Tesio]

What a joke indeed. I finally got around to installing this on my Mac and seriously, it has worse performance than the PS4. Even if I right click in some places, my frame rate drops by 50% just to turn the camera. I had to disable some other mouse utils I have on the mac, to even spin my camera around without it spinning a million times, issues like this don't exist with ANY other game on the Mac that I have.

Such a joke.

[Nemna]

I tried fiddling with the config file that you can see in the application's package contents (under Preferences). That file seems to contain some of the settings used by the Transgaming's WINE implementation, but nothing I did seemed to have any impact on how the game plays. Ultimately I tried deleting it outright, but the game still played normally (that is 'abysmally'), so maybe its presence is purely vestigial.

(Hopefully I'm not in trouble now for modifying "game files".)

Edit: Just to be safe, I'm going to reinstall/re-patch the game. Who knows, maybe this will trick it into working. :P

[Delily]

D:

If they were going to do such a poor job on it, SE should ask for their money back and just do a native OS X port in-house. It shouldn't be that much more effort than maintaining a PS3/PS4 and PC version.

If people are getting such poor performance as they say they are, Parallels would even be faster.

Ok, hold on here, it's not that simple. The game engine used to build FFXIV does support PSGL and GMN(X) which are the graphics APIs used in the PSX line. It does not support either OpenGL or Metal the APIs for use on OSX. Adding support for a new API is not a trivial task. While I agree SE should build a native client, it's a rather large task.

[FayKayuun]

I tried to submit a ticket through this channel and repeatedly get this message:

Contacting Square Enix Online Support
You must provide a valid Order ID or the email address you used for the purchase. Please retry here.

I've tried with both my order ID and with the email address I used to make the purchase. I can't believe SE thinks it's okay to treat (new!) customers this way....

Jeeze, that sucks really bad. I had no idea you had already tried.

My order was cancelled today. We'll be getting the PS4 version, what a joke that they thought to list the specs AFTER release.

By the by, my girlfriend's computer has an Nvidia 650M or whatever, and hits all the other requirements. I'm pretty sure an equivalently powered Windows computer could achieve higher than 8-14 FPS on the lowest settings. The wrapper is unoptimized, and a mess, and people are paying for something that Square-Enix slapdashed out the door. Blizzard has its problems, that is certain. But Mac ports have never been one of those problems. SE needs to get it together, they could've had a super successful Mac release. They certainly had the money to develop a native port.

They need to do what WB did with the Arkham Knight PC port. Take it down, revisit the drawing board, actually work on a port. If people want the crappy client in the interim, they need to just make it free.

[JDHiro]

FWIW, you can plug a keyboard and mouse in the PS4 version and switch to mouse mode and play that way just fine.

Except for the fact that keyboards have inexplicable keyboard lag on PS4 FFXIV. It's infuriating.

[FayKayuun]

Just dropping in to thank the Mac port purchasers for the warning and to say I'm sorry you got shafted. I have a Macbook Pro and have been using Bootcamp when traveling. Thanks for saving me $60.

This is extremely disappointing. And here I thought the lesson of 1.0 was learned.

At least we can achieve this for people who haven't dropped money on it yet. If you're(general you) thinking of doing it, the general advice is run away, very quickly.

[JDHiro]

Given that the FPS difference between the highest and lowest settings is almost the same (both low), I'm really feeling like they messed up some configuration somewhere. I'm going to give SE a few weeks to get this sorted out, and if that doesn't work... probably just cancel my sub. Not out of spite or anything - I just don't have the time to deal with installing Bootcamp and rebooting every time I want to jump into the game for a few minutes.