What is the status of the game on a Mac performance-wise

zarnon_akoni

Hi - I stopped playing for two months hoping some performance fixes would be coming soon. I played for a couple hours saturday and sunday morning and the game was not horrible. This forum is such a quagmire of furious players (me included) and ZOS employees obfuscating over what is being done its really hard to see if I was just lucky or there have been legitimate fixes.

I saw a significant decrease in the number and duration of load screens, i was no longer attacked by "invisible" enemies that hadn't fully loaded visually but could do damage, and merchants and others in cities had much shorter delays when trying to interact with them. I did see crafting and farming was a bit wonky...the process does not finish (for example mining) or allow you to repeat (when refining) consistently. These are things that should work 100% of the time. Quitting the game is also wonky right now. It takes forever. I did a BG and it was fine for most of the time until there were too many people in too close an area firing off too many spells and then it froze for a couple seconds before catching up (obv a huge issue in BG).

If others are seeing this too then great news. If I was just playing during less busy times and it is not sustainable, where that is unfortunate. Can anyone share feedback? ZOS can you share a "state of the union" here for mac users?

FierceSam

In general

Way better and more consistent than it was in Q4 last year.

Content is great, new dungeons are fun. When it’s working it’s a great game.

Mac client is way more stable, but still flakey after more than 2 hours solid play, so crashes happen but much less frequently than previously

FPS is still patchy although again it’s better than it was. However, you will still get bogged down to single digit FPS in places like Alinor. Lag and elastic banding are still issues.

Group Finder is still not fit for purpose. Someone in your group apparently declined to fix it.

Mac client still doesn’t quit gracefully and either black screens for an insanely long time (like HOURS) or just crashes on quitting. While not game-breaking it indicates poor programming and/or design. Force quitting (Apple-alt-esc) resolves this and generates an appropriate error report.

ZOS’s poor communications skills re ongoing Mac development leave a lot to be desired and don’t fill anyone with confidence.

It’s still my game of choice though.

Viscous119

Performance wise...it's not good. The developers seem to be Windows people.

otab

I'd say that performance-wise, the vulkan/metal mac client is now close to what the former opengl client was. (For me, at any rate, on a 2018 MacBook Pro, but your mileage may vary).

It's still got issues, and fps randomly will go in the toilet for short periods, most often in crowded places, but overall it's playable now.

Stability-wise, it's a mixed bag. Extended length play sessions are a gamble; the longer you play, the more likely you're risking a crash to the desktop. I think I'd advise that before jumping into something vital, a restart might not be a bad idea.

The long, black screen of woe on close is still present. If you leave it alone, it usually will eventually exit. The problem seems to be the client deallocating a lot of memory buffers, and it seems that the longer you've played, the longer the shutdown's deallocation will take to complete.

Luckily, Cmd+Opt+Esc will immediately terminate the client from the black screen.

FOULMISCHIEF

I've been vigorously testing the Metal client for the last week. Here are my thoughts.

The Metal client performs well, however, Windows still provides better overall performance and stability. (I'm seeing better CPU and GPU utilization in Windows.) Additionally, the Metal client is currently missing feature parity with previous clients.

Vertical sync, from my testing, is unstable, with and without GPUSmoothingFrames enabled. MinFrameTime doesn't work at all. (This is an absolute deal-breaker for me.) Lastly, the view distance setting appears to be much more demanding, as higher values are required to reduce object pop-in.

There's also small, irritating bugs like crashing at startup, mouse cursor bugs (one affecting player movement), and black-screen hanging on exit. I, however, did not experience any of the mid-game crashes during longer play sessions that many players have been reporting.

zarnon_akoni

What I find interesting is that it appears at users across the board have issues. I have a late 2013 21" iMac. I'd expect I'd be pushing the limits but I also see folks with much newer macs having the same or worse issues.

Vivifier

on a 27" imac 2017 on 1440p I get 40-60 fps all around. the patches did work BUT there is still a lot of work to be done since alot of textures ( ground textures for example on rocky areas) are displayed as well mud. At some point some ZOS employee said they will work on problems on the game at the second half of the year to fix performance for all platforms.

personally i feel the are working at it given they are also pushing elsweyr and ironing that so they can make IRL gold.

I hope eventually we do get a close-to-windows experience since the clock is ticking since newer games or older are keeping up and expanding their mac os clients. At the end metal will be the thing for macs and some companies will take the time to make clients for it.

Conclusion I have hope and patience but in a few years if something more stable comes along I ll have to rethink what I want to do with my gaming time.

nathan_bri

Performance is vastly subpar compared to what it was before the wrecking ball of moving to MoltenVK. Running in Windows is fine and feels as good as it ever did.

Beyond performance issues, there is the tedious issue of not being able to get mouse control back if you switch from Fullscreen mode to Windowed mode (still annoyingly no Windowed-Fullscreen available). You have to make sure to hit Period or bring up your Inventory or something and THEN go to Windowed mode with Command-M or whatever you use.

And then there are things like the weird rendering anomalies that pop up, even after Repairing the client and tossing the rendering cache files. And changing the rendering settings makes no difference. They can be highest or lowest and, at least on my client, I still get these stupid reflective squares (see below).

At this point, I pop on the Mac Client to grab the daily reward and that's about it. If I want to do anything useful, I switch to Windows 10 within Bootcamp.

Note: I am getting 55–60 fps out in the wilderness and these images are captured at very low quality settings to make the reflective squares more visible. In Windows, with the same settings in the same location, I could be pushing 120 fps or higher. Mac performance is sh*t.

Vapirko

It functions like *** on Mac compared to Windows. I play windows primarily but log in on my Mac as it’s what I use when I travel for work and there’s just no comparison. It’s playable but unstable. I get random quits, I have to reset the permissions half the time becuse I still get that spinning camera bug when I start up, and the game overall just doesn’t look as good at least in my MacBook Pro screen, but it’s a great screen so there’s no reason for it.

Viscous119

Functions like Crap

demerdecanswrath

All Mac work is based on contracts.

What is also extremely annoying is that the packaged eso.app in use is written 6 YEARS ago by some low tier freelancer (Chris Dillman on the About tab) and that's that, apparently. A bounce on the Dock is all ZoS needs to declare it worthy of releasing to the public, with no regard to user experience.

Ever since, ZoS has been annoyingly and discouragingly frugal with macOS development. It feels like a barely functioning school project.

agegarton

Agree with all of the above. I'm also getting some patchy graphics, patchy and very inconsistent FPS, all of which is better now that it was directly after they redeveloped the client. However, performance isn't as good as it was originally and it should - technically - be better now!

My biggest issue and annoyance is the apparent inability to quit the game without a force quit, and the fact that something in the game or launcher apps seem to cause critical system failure when left open for any length of time. I have spent years never having to hard restart any of my Macs - since the last game client update I have had to hold down that on/off button several times a week, which annoys the pants off me.

Given the extra slowdown in Mac-related fixes, I think this is where we have landed for the long term (which is disappointing). I am currently deciding whether to buy a gaming PC just for this game, or simply move away from ESO to something else. ESO is not unplayable by any means, but it causes more frustration than any other app or game I have.

(for the record, I have the current highest-end iMac that money can buy, more than capable of running this game easily).

FierceSam

Pretty fing rubbish to be honest.

I love the game and really enjoy playing with my friends. But the Mac is the half-beaten unloved child being kept chained up and abused in a cellar by an uncaring foster family only interested in the associated social security payments.

randallkn

Any updates on the performance issues? Can we play again? Can we spend any money?

nathan_bri

The performance of the game on Mac for me is unacceptable. I refused to go through extra hurdles to make my camera not spin 20 times a second as I do not have this problem in any other Mac game, and this is even bypassing the launcher app. Until they fix it permanently, I am not subscribing, not upgrading, and not spending another dime on this poorly-supported hot garbage. I will continue to log in once a day, collect my reward, try not to throw up, then log back out because I am hoping they will eventually fix it.

FierceSam

AS of update 1/7/19 fundamentally unplayable

Constant random crashes to desktop

Uncontrollable spinning toon that requires admin level fix in system preferences EVERY TIME YOU RESTART THE GAME

Lag

Low FPS - 30FPS is a rare high, usually it's in the 10s or lower

App never quits gracefully and requires a force quit every time

ZOS don't care, they aren't fixing it and it will die disgracefully with Catalina

demerdecanswrath

nathan_bri wrote: »

I will continue to log in once a day, collect my reward, try not to throw up, then log back out because I am hoping they will eventually fix it.

Summed up my experience for the past 5 months (I was desperate before that).

Coorbin

I can't even play the game at this point natively on macOS Catalina because it won't start (even bypassing the launcher), but on Mojave the performance was fine for me.

Puodas

Weirdest thing is that game play is different from PC, e.g I get lower DPS while playing on mac, it feels like everything is slower even when FPS is around 50, less responsive

alterfenixeb17_ESO

Coorbin wrote: »

I can't even play the game at this point natively on macOS Catalina because it won't start (even bypassing the launcher), but on Mojave the performance was fine for me.

It's fine as long as you have any decent GPU equipped. I.e. with eGPU Vega 64 now I have easily 30 fps in cities using QHD and ultra settings (+ a few extras enabled further degrading performance). By comparison when I use GeForce 775M in 2013 iMac I can barely use medium settings due to poor performance (loading screens out of nowhere, missing textures). And low settings don't help this much either.

ethernut60

Coorbin wrote: »

I can't even play the game at this point natively on macOS Catalina because it won't start (even bypassing the launcher), but on Mojave the performance was fine for me.

Catalina has done away with 32 bit support and the launcher has 32 bit components. Unlike OpenGL, ZOS didn't jump the gun a year early and attempt to provide a 64 bit launcher.

eMKa8

Hi everyone

I am now at fps of 18-30
But it is playable ...

It lags a bit but quite ok. This is at high quality level

When playing at medium level it is 30-45

Is this the sae with yiu guys?

I dont see any change when deactivating my addons ...
How could i improve my fps outside of the game? Are there any mac settings i should look at?

ZOS_Lunar

Greetings!
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