Quote Originally Posted by Sigma-Astra View Post
Well, I'd argue that if you need a third party software to run the .EXE files for XIV on a Mac correctly, then that still doesn't necessarily mean that the Mac OS system was built first and foremost to run them in the first place.

Unless you're paying $5,000 for an iMac Pro, you're not getting a good graphics card otherwise. Even my own Macbook Pro has two graphics cards built into it, costs me $2,000 from the Apple store, refurbished even, and I wouldn't trust XIV on this thing. You could easily spend that $5,000 on a custom Windows PC and get more bang for your buck, hell, less than that even.
Surely. It's not cost-effective to buy a mac for playing windows games. I suppose someone could eventually buy an eGPU for gaming, but macOS support there is still a bit lacking (10.14 seems to be improving that though) and getting an eGPU connected to a Mac to work with Bootcamp is not a walk in the park. Users will still have a much better experience using Bootcamp than Crossover/Wine or the bundled Transgaming fork of Wine which is what the Mac "port" uses.

But it's not quite correct to say macOS doesn't support games. Or that Apple's branded hardware doesn't support games. It just doesn't support -this- game because it doesn't support DirectX. If SE had coded FFXIV using OpenGL as their base, making platform-specific adjustments would have been a much easier task. Instead, Winei s used to convert all the Windows-specific API calls and there's a performance hit.