Waves of vitriolic gamers forced Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix’s hand, prompting the company to suspend sales of the Mac version of its online roleplaying opus heading into the holiday weekend, citing—as with Arkham Knight—serious performance issues.
The game’s producer/director Naoki Yoshida outlined the issue in a 2,000-word mea culpa on Square Enix’s forums. In summary: the Mac version was released too soon, the system requirements were set too low, and boy is Square Enix ever sorry. The word “apologize” occurs seven times on the page.
The Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV uses middleware developed by TransGaming to get Windows’ DirectX visual systems working in the Mac’s OpenGL environment. That, in portability parlance, is what’s known as a wrapper, and since wrappers have to translate crazy-complex rendering logic in realtime, they always induce a performance penalty. Studios use wrappers to port games much faster, lowering their development costs. But what’s interesting in Yoshida’s disclosure is his claim that a native OpenGL version would still have been significantly inferior to the DirectX version.
“Taking into account FFXIV’s high-end graphics, and the need to simultaneously render multiple objects, we determined that it would be near impossible to provide the same frame rate in native OpenGL that could be achieved with DirectX,” he writes, going on to explain why, and that both cost and the low rate of native performance returns led to the company’s decision to use a wrapper.
Long story short, if you want to play Final Fantasy XIV at maximal speeds on a Mac, use Boot Camp. If you want a refund, Square Enix has you covered here. And if you bought the game and plan to ride things out, Yoshida says the company plans to update the game’s system requirements imminently, continue to improve the game’s performance, and once those two points align, re-release the game for sale.
Indeed, Yoshida writes that “With the adoption of DirectX11 for Mac, and the replacement of OpenGL with a new graphics API in Apple’s next OS, the fundamental gap in current performance issues may soon be eliminated.”
