fer0nBaldur's Gate 3 Now Available on Mac
bestturtleboyCompletely worth every penny
I have a M1 Pro and it plays decently on medium settings compared to my desktop.
It runs alright on my 2021 M1, but I play it via GeForce Now these days, where it really screams.
I want to signal boost that GeForce now option! It looks gorgeous at everything ultra, although it’s not really necessary for the game to make an impression. But it is nice to look at via GFN ✨
But I realize that we probably shouldn’t lean too heavily on that option, lest we discourage devs from actually making native Mac ports…
For me the only reason I tried was because Larian silently removed the Mac release date when they missed it, and then they didn’t communicate anything until after the PS5 release. They removed the Mac info from their website entirely.
I had been planning for months to play with friends and it was a huge disappointment when we finally went to play on release date and I couldn’t join. Then I spent a bunch of money and time on parallels, which only half worked.
I really appreciate their work and previous ports, this experience sucked though.
dontwakethetrees (she/her)I’m surprised you’re only at medium settings, my M2 Pro is handling 1440p at mostly maxed settings (disabled DOF as it’s too aggressive and only double buffered vsync. I don’t have an FOS readout but it’s pretty good compared to before with Crossover and medium settings.
WhiteHotaruSee this comment for a readout: lemmy.world/comment/3783578
I never play on Mac M1, should I? I have a ps5, how would performance compare to that? If m1 might actually have comparable performance I might need to get into it and have games streamed using steamlink to my tv.
Currently it doesn’t really matter how good performance is on a mac there are very few games supported. This will probably change in the future with the new game porting toolkit tho.
I can’t imagine anyone buying a Mac specifically for gaming. Anyone who’s into gaming will be on windows, but if you’re not super into it or it’s simply more convenient to play on a MacBook it’s definitely nice to have.
Mac is pretty far behind Windows and Linux in gaming. But there are signs that Apple is slowly waking up on that front.
Whether you want to play it on Mac or PS5 imo primarily comes down to whether you want to play with a controller or a M+KB
Steam will refund you as long as you’ve played for less than a couple of hours, so there’s no harm in buying the game and doing a little test before committing one way or the other.
HeartyBeastGoing to get this just encourage the Devs.
Bloody with Valve. would recompile any of their Mac games to be 64 bit/M1 compatible. I want my TF2 back!
It is mind boggling that Valve won’t bother recompiling Source games for Mac. I guess they figure it isn’t worth it?
At this point they’re seemingly all in on Linux. If it ever reaches a point where <50% of users are on Windows, I imagine they wouldn’t even bother with Windows releases anymore
It’s mind boggling that Apple would drop 32bit support. Adding 64 bit support can be a lot of effort, especially on older code bases, and there’s a whole bunch of games that’ll never receive updates again. You could’ve had arm32 support, with the ability to run any x86 games.
It’s bad on both sides. Apple broke userspace but Valve could almost certainly compile for modern Apple systems without too much effort.
I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but porting to 64bit is way more involved than it may seem. x86-64 is different enough to x86 that you’re basically porting to a new architecture: all your assembly will break just like it would porting to arm. On top of that all your sizes have changed and caused all sorts of bugs, for instance:
long is 4 bytes under 32 bit on all platforms, but it’s 8 bytes on macOS & Linux and 4 bytes on Windows under 64 bit.
But they’ve done it before… Other Source engine games, like Counter Strike Global Offensive, have been recompiled to run on modern macs. I understand it takes some effort but it’s still dumb.
Yes, but it’s highly unlikely they can reuse that effort. TF2 uses an older version of source, so you either end up having to update everything to a newer version or redo all the effort you’ve already put in to porting source, but for an older version. Now multiply that by the number of source games.
Valve is worth billions of dollars. TF2 almost certainly generates enough income to justify the resources needed to recompile the game. Again, I totally understand that it requires effort but it’s still dumb.
Oh I’m sure they can justify spending the time porting the game. I just can’t blame them for not doing so when Apple’s policy is to not give a shit.
Thank you for this perspective. It brings my irritation levels down a …. Bit
Tick DracyThe game is also available on GOG for those that don’t want any kind of DRM on it.
Wait, what? I didn’t know they had newer games as well. Did that change at one point or has it always been this way?
I second this 👀
It’s been this way for years, I think more than a decade. At least The Witcher 2 and 3 were available on GOG when they released.
Never_Sm1leOf course, CDPR owns GoG
At one point (2016 I guess) they started selling new games, also.
nocturne213I got No Man’s Sky on release day from GOG back in 2016 (now if only they would get the Mac version), so it has been at least that long.
Unfortunately you can’t cross play between GoG and Steam, and my friends already bought it on steam.
Madiator2011Just played the game with friends 2 on gog and 2 on steam. Just make sure to have Larian account and have host generate the direct connect code.
Oh, I didn’t know you could do that, thanks!
Don’t even need a Larian account (or the launcher for that matter). Direct connect is enough
Absolutely insane that it’s running better on my M2 MacBook than my 3070 desktop
Which m2 are you running?
Yeah I should probably add that it’s the 12-Core M2 Pro. I’m pretty close to the top of the line for MacBooks right now but I am still very impressed that it delivers. Not to mention how quiet the fans are; if they run at all.
What CPU do you have for your desktop? Baldur’s Gate is a bit more CPU intensive, but that’s still some crazy optimizations.
Uh funny timing but my desktop has been getting worse and worse recently until it just became unusable. Just opened it up to find that the liquid cooling for the CPU was leaking… I might have been neglecting my PC for a while. hopefully performance will be better once I get this fixed (and cleaned out)
afoutopatisaDropping my M2 Air 16GB settings in case it’s useful:
- All graphic settings at LOW (except textures I have at Ultra w/ anisotropic x16)
- FSR1 activated at Performance (this is a MUST)
- U3421WE Ultrawide native res is 3440x1440, I run at 2752x1152
- Anti-aliasing I have off because I don’t like this blurry stuff
- Everything else is off
- Gives stable 40 FPS, sure graphics are not great, but it’s very much playable
I have the same hardware and play everything at ultra at 2000something x 1440 resolution. I did not measure FPS, but it does not stutter and videos are sharp. This is on the internal display. I have to see how it performs on my 4K display. Any good method to measure FPS?
Yeah just open terminal and type /bin/launchctl setenv MTL\_HUD\_ENABLED 1
I’m curious how you can run it at ultra. Maybe my 3440 ultrawide makes such a big difference?
2000somethingx1600 is on the internal Display of that MacBook Air and it might be that my expectations to graphics FPS wise are not very high. Normally I play Civilisation or Kerbal Space Program and one of my most loved games is Master of Orion 1 on a whooping 640x480 pixels. I’ll check later, what FPS I get.
Ok. KSP and its 5 SPF gameplay did lower my expectations to modern games, apparently. Looks like I run BG3 around 15 to 25 FPS 🙃
Running on an iMac M1. Thanks for the tip about FSR1.
At similar settings except
- Resolution 1680 x 945
- Textures on High, not Ultra
I get around 35fps playable enough
Just an additional note that Sonoma’s ‘Gaming Mode’ has bumped up the frame rate quite considerably for me.
Sebas Álvaro