Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Degraded optimization on macOS

I have a macbook 14 m1 pro. Ever since the game came out, I've been quietly playing at 60fps (in act 3 50+) on FSR quality. With the release of each new patch the optimization is getting worse, little by little. But after the 6th patch is no longer about any 60 fps speech, all the same settings and 30-40 fps + microfrizes.

If you put the settings below, it's just not pleasant to look at the blurred picture. If before on weekends I spent a lot of time in the game, now it's simply not interesting, because either play with high fps and a terrible picture, or with low fps and acceptable picture. and in any case will be microfreezes, after the 6th patch.

Are there plans to improve the optimization of the game for macOS in the future?

Patch 6 really did kill the Mac version.

And there is no way to go back to Patch 5.

I've also noticed a massive hit to the MacOS version - even running a 40 GPU M3 Max. On my first play through - was always silky smooth evening displaying on the Mac Studio at 5 K. Now even the loading screens have stuttering to the degree I'm not even going to try to keep playing. Hopefully an update / patch to fix this soon.

Yep. I have an intel based Mac, high end, like the EA specs indicated, and I have also seen a significant decrease in performance. I have managed to tweak things to get the performance to be stable at a significant loss of quality.

They have a new internal team and I think they are rushing compatibility while sacrificing performance and the team may not be fully built out yet.

Similar issue here on M3 Pro. Noticed a slight performance drop after the latest major patch, but continued playing. But a few days ago there was another small patch and after that sometimes during the dialogues FPS drops massively (to about 15 or so), depending on the camera angle. Very annoying. Tried cleaning cache, fresh install, nothing helped. Even the Lowest graphical settings didn't help a bit (before I was playing on high-medium with no issues).

What aspect ratio are you using? oddly, part of the fix involved a change to the aspect ratio.

I created a forum account just to post how bad this is.

M1 Max with 64gb. Even on the lowest settings it looks like I’m watching a low budget claymation tv show.

Shameful that Larian let this patch through QA. It’s obvious to anyone who had played pre patch.

Interesting, I'm using 16:10. What aspect ratio helped you fix it? Or just changing it to anything should fix it?

M2 Max, 32GB memory — laggy, stuttering and overall unpleasant even if I bump down the resolution and settings below the recommended ones.

Do the developers read the forum? Would like to get at least some information from them.

It is obvious that everything is bad and something should be done about it, otherwise there is no point. 1-2 more patches and the game will finally die on macOS.

Where would one read updates from the developers acknowledging terrible issues like this? Just on this forum, or do they have some alternative communication outlet / area? Besides patch notes.

Same here. M2 Max, 12 CPU 38 GPU 65GB ram. Huge weekend bummer. I was really enjoying the game up until now, thinking "wow what a great studio Larian must be."

I was using 16:10 and when I switched to 16:9 it solved a lot of problems. I have no idea why.

I should point out that I am on a 27" iMac.

Created an account just to say that I am also experiencing lag and graphics issues after Hotfix 21. Never had any problems before this, played the whole game once already. I'm on a 16" M1 Max 32GB.

Aspect ratio is not the problem. I'm running 16:9 at 4k. A 16:10 ratio won't even offer a valid 4k resolution, only much lower ones like 1440xsomething and less (I forget the specifics offhand).

Even more to-the-point, I've ALWAYS been running at 16:9 / 4K without any issues until hotfix #21. Hopefully they fix it soon. Mac users haven't been able to play since last Thursday. :-(

Forum posts aren't likely to motivate a solution. You need to submit a bug report. I don't have the link handy, but if you poke around you'll find it. I think one of the Reddit posts about this had links. You can also email directly, but again I don't have the address handy.

Regardless, I agree with the spirit of your follow up. This was clearly broken early Thursday and it just stayed like that all the way through to the weekend. A rollback of hotfix #21 would have been the prudent course of action.

EDIT: I think this is the link to submit bug reports

https://larian.com/support/faqs/how-to-submit-a-bug-report_85

I've sent a link to the topic to support. We'll see what they say.

Hello! Sharing this here as well:

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)

All due respect, as of tomorrow morning this will have been going on for about 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.

totally agree with this gentleman