FFXIV black screen issue on MacBook Air 13/Mac OS Catalina 10.15.15

[SinfulExistence]

Hi guys. So I purchased the game on my MacBook Air 13 with MacOS Catalina 10.15.15 and I'm left with a black loading screen. It works fine on my Windows 10 desktop. Launcher is fine and works perfectly. I've done some research and there seems to be an issue with the game working on any systems with the Intel Iris Plus Graphics? If anyone could help that would be great.

[Dynratygus]

Good afternoon and thank you for visiting the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

Could you post the specifications with your Mac? Additionally, what have you tried to alleviate the issue?

Thank you for visiting the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums

[SinfulExistence]

I've reinstalled it twice now along with deleting my cookies from Safari as one of the other threads suggested.

My specs are:

CPU: Intel CORE i5
RAM: 16GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory
Storage: 256GB SSD storage
Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics

[Rhaervis]

Good afternoon and thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

Please try the following troubleshooting steps:

- Ensure the latest version of Safari is installed on your Mac (even if you don't use Safari.)
- After updating, open Safari browser and make sure that all Browser History and Cookies/Web Data have been deleted.
- Please also make sure that "Cookies" are accepted and not being filtered.

Once these options have been adjusted, please run the Apple Update program to check that all firmware is up-to-date on you Mac OS. Once this process is complete, please re-launch the FINAL FANTASY XIV application.

-Make sure your fire wall or antivirus program is not interfering with the game

- Check to see if the following port ranges are opened on your router. You can contact your ISP and request they open them for you:
▼TCP
54992 through 54994,
55006 through 55007,
55021 through 55040

Thank you for visiting the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

[Packetdancer]

I've done some research and there seems to be an issue with the game working on any systems with the Intel Iris Plus Graphics? If anyone could help that would be great.

Unfortunately, yep. I did something of a dissection of the mac client's Crossover bottle several months ago to try to help someone with a similar issue, and while I'm not 100% sure, as best I could tell, the newer (Catalina-compatible) version of Crossover now uses a different way of handling DirectX translation. It seemingly uses DXVK to translate Direct3D calls to Vulkan equivalents, and then that is layered atop MoltenVK (which translates Vulkan calls to their Metal equivalents, Metal being Apple's 3D graphics API).

However, MoltenVK appears to only be able to support Vulkan 1.0 (or... 1.02, or something similar, it's been months and I don't remember the exact sub-version) using the Intel Iris' more limited feature-set, and DXVK requires Vulkan 1.1 support to do so. So as best I can tell, what happens is basically that FFXIV requests a Direct3D interface, DXVK requests a Vulkan interface, MoltenVK returns a Vulkan 1.0 interface, DXVK goes "I can't use this", and everything gets very, very confused and you end up with a program wondering where its graphical interface went, but an error state which doesn't surface properly in order for them to display an error dialog of any sort.

The upshot of which is that the upgrade to the version of Crossover that can run on Catalina should improve the DirectX performance for supported cards by using Metal for Direct3D rendering... but that it simply cannot run on the Intel Iris GPU built into Intel chips any longer. And so far as I can tell, no amount of tweaks and configuration fiddling is likely to work to get it running again there.

Technically, I don't think it was ever supposed to work with Iris—the system requirements for macOS do list a discrete GPU as a requirement—but previously it would mostly work anyway despite that. I believe, though I am not certain, that it will work fine with an eGPU (external discrete GPU) connected to the computer; MoltenVK supports eGPUs, so in theory so should Crossover built atop MoltenVK. (Well, built atop DXVK atop MoltenVK...) Just don't quote me on that, because it's not something I've ever tried, nor have I seen confirmation of it working.

It should also still work with Iris when booted into Windows under Boot Camp (and using the Windows client), because there DirectX will be using Intel graphics drivers directly. Instead of a translation layer on top of another translation layer on top of a graphics API, as on macOS. The performance won't be great, but it will exist.