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

[Avenger]

Yoshi P addresses Mac client issues:

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...641512f05a9e14

This boggles the mind:

"Taking into account FFXIV's high-end graphics...we determined that it would be near impossible to provide the same frame rate in native OpenGL that could be achieved in DirectX...

We came to the conclusion that...making the use of middleware would be the best road to take in realizing a Mac version of FFXIV..."

On what planet is adding an extra layer of middleware going to INCREASE performance?

[Sakei]

This boggles the mind:



On what planet is adding an extra layer of middleware going to INCREASE performance?

I think he's stating that OpenGL is a fairly bloated API compared to Direct X. He never stated anything about performance being improved by the Middleware. What he was saying is that an OpenGL Mac client would have cost them a lot of money and still not have performance on par with Windows. It was simply more cost effective to go with the middleware, and the company in question actually specializes in ports for Mac.

[Avenger]

I think he's stating that OpenGL is a fairly bloated API compared to Direct X. He never stated anything about performance being improved by the Middleware. What he was saying is that an OpenGL Mac client would have cost them a lot of money and still not have performance on par with Windows. It was simply more cost effective to go with the middleware, and the company in question actually specializes in ports for Mac.

It would have been much clearer to say:

"Because we thought even a native OpenGL Mac version would have poor performance regardless, we didn't think it was worth the effort, so instead we decided to save time and money by releasing a version that uses the Cider/Transgaming middleware to translate DirectX into OpenGL, resulting in the very poor performance that many of you have observed."

[KisaiTenshi]

I think he's stating that OpenGL is a fairly bloated API compared to Direct X. He never stated anything about performance being improved by the Middleware. What he was saying is that an OpenGL Mac client would have cost them a lot of money and still not have performance on par with Windows. It was simply more cost effective to go with the middleware, and the company in question actually specializes in ports for Mac.

In plain English, the game client the Mac uses is the Windows client, but the underlying WINE/Cider/Cedega implementation tries to translate DX9/DX10/DX11 calls to equivalent OpenGL calls, to which there is no 1:1 mapping for. Developers don't target the Mac because they don't feel there are enough people using the Mac platform for games to justify building a DirectX and a OpenGL version of their games. Where as a lot of other (typically open source, and emulators facilitating piracy) software don't use advanced features of DirectX/Direct3D or OpenGL and are much easier to map functionality.


Like imagine DirectX is German and OpenGL is Arabic. Neither person speaks each others language but they both have a translators that speak English. So the DirectX "German" is translated into an intermediate representation in "English" , and then the intermediate representation "in English" is translated to Arabic. So that translation also loses intonations and emphasis that was in the original language that is up to both translators to understand the significance of. It's a bi-directional communication.