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

[zerovisual79]

This is totally unacceptable. This is unplayable and my Macbook Pro is about a year only. I cannot even get up to 20 FPS. Did you guys even play this before releasing it? I am in the same boat as everyone else. I will wait a little to see if you can resolve this, but if not I am going demand a refund.

I was also told this is running in a wrapper. Are you kidding me. You should have advertised that. It should have just said FFXIV in WINE.

This is an embarrassment to your company and the fact that you released something like this is just sad.

[Pinw]

Just adding my voice to the chorus of disappointed Mac users here.

The FPS on my fresh Mac install today is about 16 fps and topping out at around 20 (at best). Not unplayable but extremely poor. If I switch to my original PC install on the same machine via Parallels, my FPS instantly soars to 50-60 no sweat. Even in the most chaotic dungeon run, I never seem to drop below 40 fps.

Please fix!

[Aizei]

After waiting almost 2 years for the client I preordered it, was billed immediately.

Square gave literally no information on when the download would be made available (though i assumed we would be able to download it for the launch)
Even on the run up to launch no information was given, i tried to contact support and was ignored and told that "the information will be released shortly" up to the day before launch.

2 hours after the servers go live i finally got my email. I spent 7 hours downloading the client, unpacked it, move did to applications and the application won't even open.

I have to "show package contents" > contents > MacOS > and run FINALFANTASYXIV exec file just to launch the boot loader. (yes I've set it to allow apps from anyone)

Now i have another 7 gig to download as an "update" and use a workaround to open the game and if your stories are anything to go on it doesn't look good....

[Jimsy]

I have been playing FFXIV ARR via bootcamp for the past two years and had no problems. Supremely excited when Heavensward was announced - downloaded, installed and getting FPS of 7 in Mor Dhona. I have a Late 2013 Macbook Pro i7, its a pretty high end Macbook.

Demanded a refund and sent a ticket.

[Jim01]

Just want to add my voice as being very disappointed with the Mac version. Considering I am paying an extra $60.00 for this after already having the Windows and PS3 version I would expect something of equal quality.

I came back just for the Mac version but I don't think I will be staying long.

[cybereal]

I have a fairly high end machine and the game doesn't even run at all. It crashes at start up. People claiming this is somehow a problem with Macs are so clueless. I play a bunch of incredibly beautiful games at very high resolution with very high graphics enabled. It's not the platform, it's the intensely disrespectful way in which the client was developed, as a Cider garbage port. It took years for the EVE Online Cider port to be passable. If Square sticks with this, maybe your $60 will get you something in... 2-3 years.

Think about this, the cider port here is emulating windows xp, with win32 APIs. 32 bit! That's why you're all experiencing horrible performance. It's 100% thunks 100% of the time.

Anyway, my machine:

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 32GB RAM, 512gb SSD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096MB VRAM

When I start the game it immediately crashes with this lovely error http://cl.ly/bkm2 and looking into the crash logs in the wine p_drive, it seems to indicate memory issues (such that the app can't create a large enough buffer for the display) and I suspect it may be due to having a 4gb graphics card while the app runs in 32 bit mode on Windows.

I can't even jump on the low FPS complain-train since the game doesn't even launch.

[Tessara]

I've been playing XIV since the beta of ARR, and while I hate that my first forum post will be about this, I too feel the need to chime in. First, my specs:

System Specs:
3.2Ghz i5
24Gb DDR3 RAM
Geforce GTX 680MX 2Gb

I tested several resolutions, with anything from low to high settings. Like others, full screen at native (2560x1440) res doesn't work, as the game sits "high", with the lower third of my screen black, and the upper third of the game UI inaccessible.

Performance is just terrible, and this is the same machine I've been playing the game on via Bootcamp for almost 2 years. I typically get 45-55fps or so with my settings, unless an area is highly populated; Mor Dhona always pushes it lower, but it's still completely playable.

In the Mac client, poking through Ishgard and Western Coerthas, I hover around 13fps, dipping to <10 if basically anything is happening. What I find really odd about the performance is that my average framerate is unchanged regardless of my settings. I see perhaps a variation of 1-3fps between the lowest "laptop" preset the "high" desktop one. I find that very curious, as it's clearly not any setting I can modify to eke some better performance out.

I know it's ported, Wine, Cider, blah blah. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a slight drop, but this is just unplayable. Were it an option to simply load up my game in OS X, the way Blizzard does cross-platform, it would suck, but I wouldn't be as disappointed since it didn't cost me $60 for the Mac version on top of the $60 for the Windows version.

I don't know what has to happen here, but this feels beta quality at best. Aside from miserable performance, while changing visual settings, the game suddenly stopped accepting mouse clicks, forcing me to restart it. I got the "no ground" bug in Ishgard, which, while entertaining, is a problem. Especially when polygons are flickering red and green, and... well, then there's the third screen shot here, which I have no words for:

No Ground
Glitchy Ground
Wut

Since I boot into Windows almost exclusively to play XIV, the thought of being to load it up while remaining in OS X is a wildly attractive proposition. I'm not posting here just to complain, and I don't even want a refund - I want this version to just WORK, and right now it really doesn't.

One last thing I want to say is that I have an insane amount of respect for the FFXIV dev team - I really do. More than I do for any other group of developers. The content, the world, and attention to detail in XIV is second to none. Because of that, I hate to have to come here and post this, but I feel obligated to chime in. Whether TransGaming needs to get themselves in gear, or the Mac version would have to be brought in-house (again, ala Blizzard), I'm not sure. But nothing would please me more than to be able to play this under OS X.

[cybereal]

... the way Blizzard does cross-platform ...

Of course, if it was the way Blizzard does cross platform, it would be excellent and there would not be this constantly growing number of people reporting unacceptable, embarrassingly bad results from this joke of a product. I don't think people appreciate just how great Blizzard's Mac support has *always* been, and I do mean always. This result just makes me want to go play WoW, despite how tired of it I am.

[askel24]

I had been using my PS4 to play before the expansion and I decided to get the mac client. Super disappointed and I'm probably going to ask for a refund if they can't help me. They really could have expanded their audience by making it mac compatible but honestly it's just garbage. I think my max FPS was 14.

[JDHiro]

I'm in the same boat as everyone else here. I held out for the Mac client, payed my $60, and it's basically unplayable on the highest spec MacBook you can buy right now. (2015 15" Retina MacBook w/ Radeon M370X).

Even running at 720P is painful. It's almost the same performance I can get playing ARR under Parallels...

I played Guild Wars 2 on a MacBook w/ 650M graphics, and even that was worlds better than this.

I don't even know what to say. I'm hugely disappointed. I can't play on my PS4 because of the epic mouse/keyboard lag, and I can't play on my Mac because the performance is totally screwed up.