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

[Moggei]

Yeah, I played around for a few hours last night and as is, I saw no improvement since the client isn't optimized for El Capitan. If anything, it was much worse than normally. Tried a slew of config changes and nothing. So, if you're having issues now then probably best to simply wait until SE or TG makes use of Metal.

[sarahnight]

This will not be a quick fix... i am not surprised El Capitan was worse, its beta software, not even optimized for the platform let alone for FFXIV. I think Square will put pressure on Transgaming to make this less krappy, but again, Yoshi can always lean on the middleware 30% tax in performance so long as we're stuck in a wrapper. And Yoshi's own words indicate despite the embarrassment of the Mac launch, they will not do a native version because they've decided they are not so embarrassed that its worth the cost of doing it. So at least for the next year, the best we can hope for is 1) El Capitan releases and is good, and 2) Transgaming optimizes on Metal quickly... so maybe by Christmas it stinks less.

[Blayde]

Now they are making $0 on the mac version since its no longer on sale. Along with the costs of users contacting them to complain and processing of refunds. Not to mention a bit of a hit to trust and reputation.

They obviously thought there was some money in a mac version or they wouldn't have even done the crap version that they did. Honestly I like Yoshi, but his last statement about this was complete bullshit. Sure hes technically correct about THEIR chosen solution not running as well as a windows client. But plenty of other games using a wrapper aren't this bad.

Pulling it from sales is admitting they put out a shit product. Whether they want to come out and say it sucks or not. Enough people complained about it to make them realize it, unfortunately they didn't manage to figure this out before release or chose to ignore it.

A restaurant serving week old bread because not enough people order bread doesn't justify selling bad bread. Do it right or just don't.

[sarahnight]

i do wonder when they will start selling it again. Didn't Yoshi just say they were going to "clearly specify the requirements" and then its on us of we try to run it on sub spec system? So what would be a good Mac spec for the current offering? A Mac Pro with 2 video cards and 32 gb of ram still seemed to have problems getting over 30 fps. So what is considered good enough?

[Blayde]

i do wonder when they will start selling it again. Didn't Yoshi just say they were going to "clearly specify the requirements" and then its on us of we try to run it on sub spec system? So what would be a good Mac spec for the current offering? A Mac Pro with 2 video cards and 32 gb of ram still seemed to have problems getting over 30 fps. So what is considered good enough?

They must be really out of touch if they think setting specs to even the minimum mac pro is acceptable. If it won't run on a good portion of at least the mid to high end macbooks then they are going to miss most of the mac players.

[AvathAlThor]

A friend of mine has been getting on fine with the Mac client (I'm yet to learn how he's managed this, sadly), and has come from playing via Boot Camp so would have ditched it right away if he'd had issues. So there is, theoretically at least, hope. I also noticed that the last few patches / hot fixes have included fixes for various Mac client specific issues in the patch notes, so work is clearly being done somewhere.

I wouldn't expect anything from El Capitan in terms of performance improvements at this point. Typically it'll only get patched up to work with that properly / get optimised for it, once EC has at least reached a Gold Master build. To do so before hand just isn't practical, especially when they have work on a known OS to deal with first.

Specifying specs for Macs should be really easy, it's not like there's a billion different hardware / driver / OS combos to worry about with them. Although that fact just makes SE's failures there all the more damning.

[JamieLee]

Metal isn't going to do anything unless Transgaming decides to add it to their wrapper (which they probably won't anytime soon) .. It'd have to be a native client to make use of Metal, and since Metal only runs on 10.11, they'd have to build 2 native clients, 1 for Metal, 1 for OpenGL ... Or set 10.11 as minimum OSX version of course.

No doubt a native Metal client would get good performance though.

Your right metal wont do anything do to the fact its doing all its function calls in direct x and then getting translated back to open gl. The worst decision they could have done was go with the transmog client. System calls are basic and non complex enough if they just had a open gl render in game wrapping the game itself wouldn't have been that big of a deal because the graphics engine would still be called natively in open gl just the underlying io and library system would have been translated which is nothing to a modern system.

[JamieLee]

Metal while is good at bringing up say even IGP's IGU's APU's whatever a company wants to call it this year. Is not a end all be all situation while direct x and open gl may have a lot of latency issues eg years of cruft and or poor optimizations. Metal Mantle so forth cause another issue one we used to have but don't really anymore sense most developers don't write code in assembly anymore nore do they call graphics subroutines straight to the framebuffer of the gpu. Don't get me wrong the more direct to metal or actual software to hardware you can get the faster the applications will run with a price. The price being is as follows

Not all manufactures use the same implementation on cpu and or GPU.
Not every GPU has the same instruction set and or same ability to call the same function in the same way to the rasterization engine lighting shading so on so forth.

So you need to split workloads either by vendor or do it in api level.

[JamieLee]

Hence why even Mantle Metal still rely on Direct X and open gl cause the other side is not everything also can be done in hardware without either absolute calculations or a universal method of implementation. Hence why mantle works just on amd metal works on ios and osx the major reason apple can get away with it because they only a select amount of sku's by the vendors and then they also write there own drivers. So its easier when you not only write the os the api you also write the driver to work with the os and the api creates alot of uniformity i know people give apple alot of shit but its one thing that they have on ms and linux is the fact there os is so interwined with the hardware its actually a really good eco system.

[sarahnight]

You're right of course, even with Apple's legendary adoption rate for new OS releases, it will be a long time before Metal really can be leveraged. Is this on a years timescale, like we'd have to have a couple of subsequent Mac OS X releases before it was ubiquitous in the population? Just points to Yoshi grasping at straws to placate the irate masses of Mac users, hoping for a better experience. One of the things Yoshi seemed to claim was that somehow Metal and DX11 would save the Mac client.

In the meantime, maybe people could post lists of settings that work for them in the current client? I didn't return mine and i do launch it from time to time, to see if i can find something that feels stable and playable.