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.