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

[Quiksloth]

Hi! like a number of people, I've been waiting for a mac client for quite some time. Bootcamp does get a little long in the tooth sometimes, especially since FFXIV is a game I'd like to keep logged in in the background while doing other things. The lack of communication about the mac port until its final release has been absolutely appalling, considering Guild Wars 2 has had the same form of port, and for the most part, was optimised quite well for what it was. It even had multitouch support for the trackpad.

It would seem that Transgaming was looking at making a quick buck with FFXIV which is troublesome considering how difficult it was for the wine community to make a custom wrapper for the game. It had to do with a lot of windows dependencies outside DirectX.

The other problem is that Transgaming just sold its porting technology to Nvidia, which doesn't bode well for future support of FFXIV or any Cider wrapped games.

It is also a shame considering how well the PS4 port runs, as OSX and the PS4 platform share a lot of similarities, from OpenBSD to OpenGL. I would assume that porting from the PS4 to OSX would have been a smoother transition. It would have been more work initially but far more sustainable.

Going forward, it seems like the only possibility for a Mac Client at this point is handing over the project to yet another third party studio for a complete rewrite. The two major names that come to mind are Aspyr and Feral as their ported games do run quite well. I also believe that a focus on the newly introduced Metal API on OSX 10.11 would probably yield the best performance, especially since the claimed minimum requirements for the Mac client also happen to be the base hardware requirements for Metal in OSX 10.11. If it had been completely rewritten, then the asking price of 60$ would have been arguably warranted, even though most other publishers treat Windows and Mac licenses as one and the same.

I believe the initial volume of sales for the OSX port including customers asking for a refund as well as potential clients like myself that held off until we've seen some feedback about performance should indicate to Square Enix how viable a Mac port would be.

In the meantime however, the game is best played on PC/Bootcamp or PS3/PS4. The Mac promise has been broken for now.

I'll be back to levelling my Paladin after a long break to try to finish the story quests before getting Heavensward.

[Delily]

It is also a shame considering how well the PS4 port runs, as OSX and the PS4 platform share a lot of similarities, from OpenBSD to OpenGL. I would assume that porting from the PS4 to OSX would have been a smoother transition. It would have been more work initially but far more sustainable.

Neither the PS3 or the PS4 use opengl; PS4 provides 2 APIs, GMN and GMNX.

[Undrum]

Transgaming also did the wrapper for the Guild Wars 2 client for OSX, and it works flawlessly on my machine.

Same here. Wine wrappers needn't be terrible, but an FPS loss of around 20% is what you should expect, not around 90%. This is just a shoddy job. We'll probably never know how it came to be that way:

• maybe there's something unusual about the way FFXIV is coded (to make it run well on PS3/4) that doesn't map well to Cider;
• maybe Transgaming only received the code they needed late in the day and had to do a rush job;
• maybe they were all too busy preparing for the Nvidia sale to spend much time on FFXIV;
• maybe Transgaming's senior management simply didn't care any more once that part of the business had been sold.

Fundamentally, though, it doesn't matter how it came to be. SE are the ones who sold the product and they are the ones who need to take responsibility for the state it's in. If I were them, I'd have accepted the embarrassment of a delayed Mac release rather than release something sub-standard that will cause long-term harm to their reputation.

Remaining silent on it won't help, either. Hold your hands up, admit you got it wrong and offer people a refund. At least that way you've only lost the money for that transaction, rather than losing a customer forever.

[JijaYanin]

I dunno if I should be relieved or irritated to read so many people share my problem with the Mac client. Like everybody else, I have encountered outright crashes and horrible frame rates. The game seems to not recognize or use my graphic card's entire 4 GB VRAM, but maxes out the GPU even when inside my unfurnished small player housing. It really does seem like a shoddy, unoptimized port. It runs WORSE than the PC version running in a Windows VM on Parallels!

I agree, look into Aspyr or Feral to do the porting.

[FayKayuun]

I got my SO the Mac version so she could finally play alongside me while being on her computer for convenience. She got her iMac last year, and the game runs at a stunning... 12-18 FPS in empty areas. And that's on the lowest settings possible.

What I don't get is how SE thought this was worthy of a release. Surely, quality assurance tried this and saw the results? Even people with brand new iMacs and MBPs are having issues.

I really do hope they get around to doing a proper Mac port one day.

For now, I sent in a support ticket via email, hopefully we can get a refund or a license for the PS4 version instead. It'll be inconvenient for her to have to play on the TV, but at least it will run smoothly.

[Aizei]

Same here. Wine wrappers needn't be terrible, but an FPS loss of around 20% is what you should expect, not around 90%. This is just a shoddy job. We'll probably never know how it came to be that way:

• maybe there's something unusual about the way FFXIV is coded (to make it run well on PS3/4) that doesn't map well to Cider;
• maybe Transgaming only received the code they needed late in the day and had to do a rush job;
• maybe they were all too busy preparing for the Nvidia sale to spend much time on FFXIV;
• maybe Transgaming's senior management simply didn't care any more once that part of the business had been sold.

Fundamentally, though, it doesn't matter how it came to be. SE are the ones who sold the product and they are the ones who need to take responsibility for the state it's in. If I were them, I'd have accepted the embarrassment of a delayed Mac release rather than release something sub-standard that will cause long-term harm to their reputation.

Remaining silent on it won't help, either. Hold your hands up, admit you got it wrong and offer people a refund. At least that way you've only lost the money for that transaction, rather than losing a customer forever.

personally i think they started the port on the 23rd and finished it on the 23rd. explains why a) we never knew a damn thing till after the servers went live and b) why it is unbelievably broken

[JijaYanin]

I want to add that because it seems that the performance seems to hover around 25 FPS or less no matter the hardware, suggests that the game simply does not properly recognize the hardware. This can definitely be fixed. Others mentioned that other Transgaming ports work great, as well as those used by WINE or CrossOver.

While I could ask for a refund, I want a GOOD Mac version even more. Keep my money and fix this! I know SE can do this!

[Caerai]

Just as a thought, do you think it's possible to install parallels and use the windows client by somehow getting around the Mac wrapper :-(? This may be a good temporary fix and one I might look at doing until they sort out the Mac client issues...

[Moggei]

Doubt you could get past the wrapper and also, why would anybody buy Parallels for another $80 just to run something we spent $60 on already? Would make more sense to get a refunded and buy the PC version and install under Bootcamp.

Also, TransGaming started the wrapping a while back. This isn't really a rush job, as much as they never tested anything to ensure it was optimized for Macs. But it'd be swell if somebody from SE and/or TG actually spoke up.

Guess could be grateful they didn't give it the SOE treatment, make a crappy port and strand the players on a separate server and forget about them.

[Nemna]

I'm back in the live chat support queue for the second night in a row hoping to get a refund. So far no response on my email ticket either.

It would be nice to know what SE's stance is on this -- do they think the Mac client is satisfactory?