Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems MacOS Massive performance Drop - Non-M1 Macs not supported anymore!!

2022 iMac i7 Proc - 32 Gb ram - AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT 8 GB - 500 GB ssd

Since the last patch the game has suffered a massive performance drop - unless I bring all the graphic settings way down I am getting major spikes in latency. This is outside the context of multiplayer, just playing single player.

I had previously used Metal to fine tune the graphics to where I was getting constant 30 Fps which I was fine with, but after the most recent patch those setting don't seem to be valid anymore - and as I progress into the game that performance is getting worse and worse.

And I am only at Grymforge.

I am concerned that Baldur's Gate itself will be unplayable at this rate.

edit: I get why Larian did this, it's to get the MacOS patches out quicker. However the trade off is you screw over a large percentage of Mac users by dropping support. it's also disappointing they didn't bother to announce this change or provide a pathway for us to play the game on older patches that supported the old architecture better.

I noticed that you guys have changed the MacOS requirements to indicate that it requires an M1 Pro or better now. So any Mac from 2022 or earlier is now obsolete? Is your new team not planning to support the older models of Mac even if they met previous system requirements.

Sneaky!

I guess the "solution" is to run parallels and windows on older Mac systems. Sheesh, thanks a lot Larian. I guess you guys decided to expedite the MacOs patch updates by dropping support for any Mac hat isn't on the new Unified M1 Architecture, thanks for the heads up on that. really appreciate it.

Dang, sneaky indeed.

*Sigh* There could be an innocent explanation for this, but Larian aspire to be the gold standard of game studios (as exemplified by their statements against microtransactions and live service games). They can't change system requirements after launch and in secret and claim to put their players first.

From the DICE Awards game of the year acceptance speech : "We ask you to pay one price only for the game and that's it, you can own it for the rest of your life". The secret change to requirements clearly breaks this promise.

I have the same iMac, and the Windows version of BG3 is completely broken in BootCamp — crazy stutter, frames drop down to 5fps and then go back up, all the time. It feels like a major driver issue. Native Mac app is the only way to run it.

I hope they fix the macOS version. Raw performance isn’t actually worse, it just got a lot of traversal hiccups after the patch. And Fullscreen doesn’t work correctly.

Here are the old system requirements if anyone wants to see. Apparently the change to M1 Macs occurred in September 2023, at patch 3 - still long after the game was released. Additionally the old system requirements didn't even mention M1 Macs.


Old Bg3 Mac system requirements

Link to the Patch notes for the new M1 Macs.

https://baldursgate3.game/news/patch-3-mac-support-magic-mirror-more_93