Apple Silicon M1 initial testing

[Barwara]

Another update:
As of today (Dec 24 2020) the latest updates haven't broken any compatibility with the M1 chip. Still playing the game just fine. I play with my wife who is running an intel windows system and we have the same experience in terms of dungeons, events, quests, etc. I haven't found any bugs other than what I mentioned previously, and I haven't had that issue since I last posted about it.

Hi! This is a super interesting thread. I have two questions!

Would you be able to disclose the average fps you get based on the graphic settings (max, high, medium, etc)?
I'm also wondering if you've encountered the weird terrain glitch that is common to the Mac client while playing on the M1 (the terrain will warp and obscure things depending on your camera angle. It's quite inconvenient in dungeons...) Unless you play with the windows client on emulated windows?

Thank you!

[Avenger]

So let me get this straight – you are running the existing intel macOS FFXIV client (which uses the crossover middleware to run the Windows client) and it runs just fine using the Rosetta2 translation on an M1 Mac?

That's great news for anyone who has an M1 Mac.

Personally I've found the macOS FFXIV client (which is basically the Windows client running on WINE/crossover) to be about 50% of the FPS of the Windows client running in Boot Camp on the same hardware (MacBook Pro with discrete GPU) with the same graphics settings, but it's definitely playable at lower settings and I like not having to reboot into Windows.

[Shibi]

Having now installed it on mine, it works rather well. I am surprised at the acceptable FPS from what is effectively an integrated graphics chip.

It won't be my main driver, but now I know I can quite successfully play the game away from my desktop quite reasonably.

Still amazes me just how long the batteries last for.

[gibson039]

I wanted to try the game on my base MacBook M1 Air today (the 7-core GPU with 8Gb of RAM). I needed to tweak some little things in the settings to get it to run OK but SE really should work on the compatibility with M1 chip and MacOS in general.

I play on 1680x1050 fps caped at 30 because the MacBook Air does not have any fans so it can get really hot (almost 100 Celsius !!) when I uncap. At 30 FPS I get about 87 Celsius at most. The heat it generates does not bother me when I put the MacBook on my lap. My settings are on middle since there is almost no difference between standard and middle.

Depending on the zones in Eorzea, I usually keep my 30 FPS when doing beast tribes. When I try uncap, I get between 35 and 60. It really jumps for some reason. That is also why I just cap at 30 FPS so it stay stable. Now I did tried Eden 11 Normal and mostly got 22 FPS because of all the animation of the boss. I turned down other players animation except for mine but it did not help.

Lowering the resolution to 900p and standard setting did not help.

Knowing playing through MacOS client cost us about half the FPS we should have is disappointing. From that, I can say the game is ''playable at best'' but Square Enix really should give us Mac user an updated client and a good compatibility with M1 chip. I mean, they are literally selling a broken client right now and people with Intel Mac prefer to just use bootcamp and play on windows since the Mac version is crap. Unfortunately M1 user cannot bootcamp. If Blizzard updated WoW to run on M1 on Shadowland release, Square should at least give us a proper client on Endwalker release.

I'm French, sorry if there is grammatical error and all.