Any Update on FFXIV Compatibility for ARM (M1) Macs?

[Greydor]

The "native" Mac client is terrible today - it's literally unplayable for content outside of crafting, gold saucer, selling things on the MB, etc., due to the dramatic microstuttering. I've just assumed the client had been abandoned outside of a Catalina update to literally just get it to start. I'm blindly assuming the M1 is the official end to the Mac project, where like Logitech, they may simply state that it's only available for play/purchase on Intel machines with Big Sur being the last Intel supported OS.

I think I'll always be sad that a true native client could not be created for this game.

[Packetdancer]

The "native" Mac client is terrible today - it's literally unplayable for content outside of crafting, gold saucer, selling things on the MB, etc., due to the dramatic microstuttering.

Out of morbid curiosity, I did fine-tune it to be playable on a MacBook Pro, but it requires a reasonably hefty Thunderbolt 3 eGPU to really benefit. So, it can be playable... but it costs. And while it plays acceptably, I certainly wouldn't swap to Mac as my primary platform for the game.

That said, I strongly suspect WINE—and more specifically Crossover, the WINE variant that FFXIV is wrapped in—is going to be making a serious effort to tune WINE to work properly and efficiently with Rosetta 2 in the short term. And I suspect CodeWeavers will probably try to turn Crossover into an emulator atop the M1 (as opposed to an API translation layer); Crossover is a paid-for product and if they don't have it working on the M1 chips long-term then CodeWeavers has a Problem with a capital p.

Though I don't have a lot of faith that'll work out well for gaming, to be fair. ARM is a lovely modern, efficient architecture that, when you make high-end silicon, can blow x86 out of the water... but it is a different architecture. Layering an API translation layer (like WINE) atop an emulator (like Rosetta 2) is just adding even more overhead to every single thing you do. The same way the DirectX -> DXVK -> Vulkan 1.1 -> MoltenVK -> Metal rendering pipeline for the Mac version of the game imposes a performance hit due to that many layers of translation and abstraction.

However, I also suspect that if they were ever going to do a native port for Mac, the time to do it would actually be right now, when it's already been suggested they're probably doing a PS5-native client (rather than relying on the—admittedly very effective—PS4 backwards compatibility). Because if they're already going to rework the client for PS5 anyway, it's the perfect time to make the client more cross-platform portable in the process.

I don't have faith that they're going to do that, mind you, but if they were, the timing's actually about as advantageous as you could get for something as unfortunate for the Mac subscribers as this.

[MsQi]

The "native" Mac client is terrible today - it's literally unplayable for content outside of crafting, gold saucer, selling things on the MB, etc., due to the dramatic microstuttering. I've just assumed the client had been abandoned outside of a Catalina update to literally just get it to start. I'm blindly assuming the M1 is the official end to the Mac project, where like Logitech, they may simply state that it's only available for play/purchase on Intel machines with Big Sur being the last Intel supported OS.

I think I'll always be sad that a true native client could not be created for this game.

I don't know what you are playing on but I get about 50 fps on my 5 year old Macbook. Not ideal, but more than playable. I agree it would be nice if they made a true native version though.