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

[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.