Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Hotfix #21 has broken MacOS gameplay

This has been posted here, on the Steam forums and all over Reddit. The update on 3/7/24 has made gameplay under MacOS impossible.

Since first installing, I have been getting around 30+ fps at 4k, ultra gfx settings. Haven't played the last 6 days, now suddenly getting 5fps. Even at 1920x1080 it's only around 10fps,Mar 8. Feels like hotfix #21 may have broken or changed something for us mac folk? I've tried reinstalling, clearing caches, etc. no luck. Plus as I've said, many other mac users are reporting the same.

Hopefully a fix soon?

I am experiencing similar behavior. It seems to slow down especially in certain buildings, like the entrance to the Zent hideout in W. Rest in Act 1. In other locations (outside of buildings), it seems to be just fine.

I too am hoping for a quick fix. I did report the issue via their bug reporting system. I am hoping everyone else has done the same.

Not the only one. Already an existing thread here: https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=938673#Post938673

For what it is worth, after reinstalling the game today, the issues of Hotfix #20 seem to be fixed for me. (Intel iMac 5500 XT)

I reinstalled last night and they definitely were NOT for me. Also, it's hotfix #21 that seems to be causing the massive slowdown in graphics performance, not #20.

You may not notice as much unless you're running at a high resolution (eg., 4k) at max quality (Ultra). Who knows. There absolutely has been a problem introduced though as many of us are having the exact same issue since hf21.

For me, Hotfix #20 made the game completely unplayable. Mainly, by introducing lots of frame stuttering.

It might be an ARM only issue.

I play on an M1 mac mini and the game has been running a bit worse since hotfix #21 but not significantly worse. The issue that I ran into after this update was the game taking ages to start, it kept freezing as soon as the larian studios logo came up. Since then it has been fine.

same to me, my macbook pro M1MAX 64GB RAM, it was fine before hotfix #21, now the graphic performance is intolerable.

Registered to specifically post on this thread. Same issue on my M2 Pro / 32GB RAM / Ventura 13.6.5. Hotfix 21 made the game unplayable, get very low FPS. Uninstalled, fresh install, same issue.

I am playing fine now, but I had to switch aspect ratio to 16:9 (from 16:10) and downgrade to 2880 x 1620 and medium quality across the board for everything but texture quality. This is on a 27" iMac with a dedicated Graphics card and an i7 proc.

The Mac version has taken a performance hit, there is no question. I used to be able to run it at 30 FPS at high quality and 5120 x 2880.

I know macOS is not a priority but hopefully Mac team takes a beat to improve performance for us.

Hello,
The team is currently investigating this issue with the performance on Mac. In the meantime, to alleviate the issue, they have recommended following these steps:

- Make sure you've updated to the latest Hotfix (21 as of this message)
- Switch to Borderless video mode (Settings > Video > Borderless Window)
- Lower the resolution (Settings > Video > Resolution)
- If the FPS are still low, turning on FSR mode (Settings > Video > Gamma Correction)

- Make sure you've updated to the latest Hotfix (21 as of this message)
yes

- Switch to Borderless video mode (Settings > Video > Borderless Window)
yes

- Lower the resolution (Settings > Video > Resolution)
1920 * 1200

- If the FPS are still low, turning on FSR mode (Settings > Video > Gamma Correction)
on

i've tried those steps lower the graphic performance, unfortunately the FPS still low, the only thing i can do is waiting

All due respect, as of today this has been going on for a week. I hope at least this is a top (if not THE top) priority for the dev team. Perhaps also consider giving us the option to easily roll back to prior versions under MacOS? Last I checked I don't even think we can disable automatic updates and all the rollback instructions I've seen are for Windows.

I really enjoyed the ultra graphics. I don't play games often but heard so many good things about this game. I probably won't play anything for a year or two when I'm done with it. Dropping the graphics down to playable settings really dampens the experience. I'd like to spend my last few dozen hours playing BG3 in all the glory that your studio has put into it.

They recommend lowering the resolution. You need to go lower.

On my system (M1 Max 16" Macbook Pro 64 GB, with "ProMotion" adaptive refresh and XDR display settings):

• Editing the resolution in graphicsSettings.lsx to be 768x480 was almost enough to get 60 fps inside dialogue scenes.
• For less extreme moire, setting the resolution to 960x600 in the graphics menu resulted in 30 fps in dialogues.
• For more "cinematic" dialogue, you can change the resolution to 1280x800, with which I got mean framerates of 20-25 in dialogue scenes.

In my testing, other "quality" settings had a performance impact of slim–none.

Now, you might say: And the answer is: Yes. Everybody was too busy playing Resident Evil 4 on PS2 for someone to run this patch on a mac before shipping.

Yep. I'm running an M1 Max 16" 32GB and I've just accepted not being able to play until they fix this. Was hoping we'd get a fix this week but looking like that's not happening.

Yeah I was hoping that too or at least a rollback for us MacOS folk. No gaming for me this weekend (again). Bummer.

Reposting this from a comment I made on the Steam forum for Hotfix #21:

Larian built up a lot of goodwill with me. First, they produced a great game. Second, they released it for the Mac with great performance. Thirdly, they have been steadily improving the game and fixing bugs over time. All of this is great.

However, this "fix" reveals some serious issues with Larian's quality control. It completely broke play on Macs (at least Apple Silicon) and nothing has been done to fix this in over a week. Effective controls would have made this impossible.

First, all hotfixes should be tested before they are published. I understand some minor bugs or bugs that only show up with certain hardware configurations or in specific game circumstances could be missed. No testing is perfect. However, this bug makes the game unplayable on most if not all Macs in almost all game situations. ANY testing on Macs would have caught this. There are only two possibilities. The release was not tested on Macs; or it was tested, they knew it would make the game unplayable, and they released it anyway. Neither reflects well on the company.

Second, once the issue was known they had two options. Fix it within a short period of time (say 24 hours) or, if this was not possible, rollback the hotfix until the bug could be fixed. They did neither. They have left the game essentially unplayable on one of the supported platforms for over a week.

My guess is that hotfixes are developed of the PC and then ported to the other platforms. The Mac team might be under time pressure to complete the port quickly so that it can be released to PC players, who are the main market (Larian having committed to simultaneous releases). Therefore, corners are cut to try to meet tight deadlines. This might also be why Larian does not want to roll back the hotfix as it *only* affects Mac players.

As I mentioned in my introduction, Larian built up a stock of goodwill with me. However, the longer Larian delays fixing this bug, the more that goodwill dissipates. As Gale might say, if it does not get fixed soon, I might become a tad malcontent.

Come on now, boggleboggle.

I can totally see how this got past QA:

The movie Robots was just released in theaters, you know, the one with Ewan McGregor and Robin Williams, and everybody at Larian loves it. They keep going back everyday to see it! Plus, because the game has been so successful, they splurged $12,000 and bought a Hitachi 42-inch 42PD500TA Plasma television. Really cutting edge stuff.

You can see how they might miss something like the game not playing well on "Apple Silicon" at 1080p—or something crazy like 4K: their cutting edge TV has a max resolution of 1600x1200. Plus, they hardly have time because they just can't get enough of Rodney Copperbottom and his buddy Fender—and who can blame them!

Also, imagine how hard it would be to issue an update that just undoes the previous update? What would that even look like? Too hard to figure out when you're having such a good time.

Let's just sit tight, reverse mortgage our houses, and buy Lehman Brothers stock.

hey everyone there is a solution.

keep Chess opening and launch BG3 with full screen.


thanks for steam player biggsy29, this is his post on 14/03 10:01 PM

--------------------
As seen in other threads concerning this issue, people mentioned that they forced the Game Mode on by opening Chess and going to full screen.
I tried this and an information box came up to say Game Mode was on, I left chess running opened BG3 in another window and yes it worked and the game ran fine.
So it’s obvious that for some reason the last patch is somehow not forcing the Mac into Game Mode , I sent a message to Larian giving them the info but just got the standard computerised reply suggesting remedies that have been tried over and over.
--------------------


i've tried this solution, it works better, but still not smooth as before.

What chess is he talking about? The built in MacOS one? I tried this and there is no information box that comes up. Nor is there a way I can see to launch said box. Re-downloading BG3 now to see if it has any effect, will post FPS. EDIT: I see, this requires Mac OS Sonoma. Will give it a try.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105118

But it looks like what's happening here is that the new Game Mode feature is covering up for the actual bug. So when Larian does finally fix this, switching to game mode will give us all even better performance than before, assuming one wasn't already using it. It's not that BG3 isn't activating it, it has only existed in Mac OS Sonoma and beyond. What it does is change scheduling priority (and other things) to speed up an app for gaming.