Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Slowness on MacOS since October 1 update

Is anyone else seeing slowness on Mac since the update rolled out on October 1st? No changes to my Macbook Pro M1 Max or graphics settings. I rebooted, etc.

Build 15891153

Sonoma 14.7

The lag/framerate in Act 3 is terrible.

You saying a new game started after the hotfix 27 runs slow in act 3?

Patch 7 and hotfix 27 was made available for MacOS yesterday. When I resumed my honor mode game in Act 3 I noticed it was very laggy. I tried rebooting and it was still the same. The day(s) before the patch/hotfix there were no such issues.

Submitted a bug report.

yes your old save was made with patch 6 then... which will be why

I saved and rebooted and that didn't help at all.

I have exactly the same issue. Sonoma 14.7 + MBP M3 Max. I loaded an Act 3 save game (saved with Patch 6 of course). I quit the game multiple times, re-enabled High-Power mode on the Mac. Still choppy. Using the Metal HUD I see FPS capping at 45fps, whereas it was hitting 60fps before. Also the GPU + fans clearly do not hit the max speed.

The reply to my bug report stated that they are aware of issues and asked for information.

It may be worthwhile to also file a bug to give them a wider net in order to solve.

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

I already filed a bug report yesterday and got a similar response. They are fast .

Hi, the performance in Mac is just not good, here my analysis using other ways to play and the Metal HUD:

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=950192#Post950192

It is known that performance on Mac is not on par with Windows, but this thread is about a regression.
I do agree that we should be doing what we can to get better Mac support + improve performance.

Your point about Metal 2.1 in your earlier post is interesting. Though I am skeptical that just the use of 2.1 vs. 3 is responsible for reduced performance on the Mac vs. Windows. There might be some low-hanging fruits/code changes that could help with these issues. Note also that when BG3 development started Metal 3 was probably not out at all...

Just my 2 cents: I experience the 'slowness' on act 1 (still). So it's not related to act 3 or some such. Seems to be something general. I'm on macOS 14.7.

Indeed, I am also pretty sure that this is a generic issue. Act 3 was fine (once the fans hit max) before patch 7 (hotfix 27).

I kinda assumed that it wasn't just Act 3. It just happened to be where my current game was and I wanted to be specific.

I did turn a couple settings down from Ultra to high (all things that were fine the day before), but no change. Since this is my... 4th?... playthrough, I am just going to wait for a fix rather than mess with settings more.

Does anyone else have crashing issues in act 3? Every time I start a conversation my game freezes.

Probably. Looking for info seems that Metal 3 is available even for Intel iGPUs. Put this only as reference no need to watch:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10066/

But in the same video they insist much on multithreading. Then that reminds me that BG3 on PC is a DX11 game, a managed high-level API which multithreading is much less important than for low-level APIs (like Metal), can look for DX11 vs 12 multithread comparisons to see that on DX11 the 80% of the render is executed on the main thread anyway. So BG3 targeting DX11 probably is a single-threaded rendering title, or not optimized in that area as it takes few advantage of it on PC.

Then on Mac we probably get what Apple calls CPU-GPU overlap, this is one waiting the another one. (Again put here this only for reference no need to read).
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/analyzing-the-performance-of-your-metal-app/

Solving this requires some specific work for Mac, so I am afraid we will not have it. But at least we could have MetalFX Upscaling, spatial replacing the FSR 1, and temporal to get finally that option, which at the same time get better results than FSR 2 due to the use of AI (FSR 2 is just a shader). They both requires the same data, motion vectors, so implementation should not be so hard I think.

My point for starting the thread was that something changed in the last patch. Pre-patch I had no complaints about performance on my M1 Max 32GB. After the patch, it's nearly unplayable at least from an enjoyment standpoint. If I were on my first run maybe I would continue, but on my 4th I will just wait.

Indeed. This is a regression. I think something similar had happened with Patch #21, which had again broken Mac performance.
My two cents: the performance drop with Patch 7 vs. 6 is so noticeable (not just the frame rate loss, it also stutters) that I will wait even if I was in the middle of a play through (any play through).

I updated to Sequoia and gave it a try. When I logged into my Act3 game in the lower city harbor everything was running like normal. I thought maybe the upgrade fixed it.

Unfortunately, as soon as I engaged in combat (Steel Watchers), everything slowed down to a crawl again and remained as such even after combat ended.

I did see in another thread that there is a way to downgrade to patch 6 via a beta that was made available, but I'm not sure if it's worth the risk/PITA over just waiting.

After you load the game can you wait for a couple of minutes? Also for me on Sonoma, once the loaded game starts it is smooth, close to 60fps and no stuttering but as the GPU overheats the fans do NOT speed up and in around a minute or two it throttles and then it becomes very stuttery.

Let it run for some time after loading the save game and do not start a battle. That could be an interesting data point.

I use iStat Menus. With Patch 6 in Act 3 the systems would stabilize at max RPM for the fans and also lots of Watts in power use (up to 100W). With Patch 7 the fans barely pass (if at all) 4000RPM and the Wattage is around 50, not much more. It looks like that somehow the game is throttled on Sonoma with Patch 7.

I play on a M1 Mac and runs as usually. Maybe is a specific config on High or Ultra as seems those affected are using a Pro or Max M-chip.

Try to set all to Low, then set to High one by one until notice the issue.

Interesting. I will give those things a try.

I'm playing partially on M1 Max and I hadn't played for a bit bit since the patch came out on Windows because I need cross save with Steam Deck to work. It does seem noticeably slower now than it had been. I'd just put it down to having just arrived in Act 3 as I remember complaints about Act 3 performance at release. I'm not normally super fussed about frame rate and will push the settings higher than they probably should be to get it looking prettier rather than smoother. But it's at a point where it's testing even my patience now, and turning the settings down isn't seeming to make much difference. I'm playing on Ultra at the moment. Only on turning all the way down to Low and 1080p does it feel like it's maybe getting performance similar to what I've had all through the rest of the game.

CPU-bound?. That's rare as I said I didn't noticed any issue, tested loading multiple locations including Act 3 and runs as always. But I use a M1 and the issue seems to affect Pro and Max chips, which differs their CPU cores configuration.

Try to open the system Activity Monitor and show the CPU history (Cmd + 3), then play some time and look if there are cores at 100% while others are lower, as the 100% ones would be the bottleneck.

I played last night and noticed that there was no lag for the first 10 minutes of just walking around in Act 3. Then it kicked in and changing the performance settings had no impact.

I reset back to the mix of high/ultra that the identify button sets. I then changed my aspect ratio to 16:10 and everything did work better. Not completely lag free, but significantly better than what I've seen since patch 7.

I don't have time to look check it with Activity Monitor right now, but it certainly shouldn't be CPU bound on M1 Max when it runs just fine on Steam Deck.

And yeah, it does generally seam to run better when I first start up (well, after dealing with the other problem, anyway) and then get worse as time goes on. Going through a loading screen into a smaller, indoor location will see everything running just fine until going out into the city again, as well.

I'm having this problem as well on my M1 Max, and sadly the new hotfix yesterday didn't improve things. I tested the 16:10 resolution tweak but that didn't impact performance. Has anyone figured out how to get BG3 working on Mac post-patch-7? It's unplayable for me with the extreme lag.

This was indeed introduced with Patch #7 (Hotfix #27) on Mac and I confirmed that Hotfix #28 still does not resolve it (to be fair there was no such claim in the release notes). I also wish more attention was paid to the Mac. I used to hit 60fps in Act 3 and not only it was dropped to 45 or lower, but worse, there's choppiness and sudden "jumps" in the frames presented. As other people have observed, after loading, the game is smooth @60fps, but once the machine heats up it's as if it throttles (which was not the case with Patch #6: the fans would go really loud by enabling High Power mode and it would preserve the FPS).

That sounds to throttling for heating due to excessive load. Maybe the unlimited framerate even with vsync enabled is not handled properly. So try to set vsync to Triple Buffer and set the fps limit to 60*.

And in the case of Macbooks, I'd set the energy saving mode for gaming, the performance loss can be up to 20%, but it should avoid any throttling for overheating and have a less noisy gameplay. Overheating is not new on laptops, and even if for working what matters is the total time, for gaming IMO the average performance is preferable, so having an extra at first and falling later due to overheating is worse.

* If you notice choppy motion set fps to 61 instead 60. Seems that sometimes it rounds by default and doesn't fit. I.e. I have a display with VRR 40-60, if set fps to 40 it runs choppy, but if set to 41 runs nicely.

This is a regression. THe fan only goes up to 3-4K RPM and stays there: it throttles because it cannot dissipate the heat fast enough. Thus I only get around 45fps and a lot of jitter and stutter.

With Patch 6 the fans would go all the way 5K+ RPM (much louder) but the game would also stabilize at 60fps even in Act 3. Somehow with Patch 7 it cannot trigger the fans to go higher. Note that by default all MBPs are NOT in High Power Mode. You need to enable it otherwise the fans never reach that high. For both Patch 6 and Patch 7 I am using High Power Mode (under Battery).

Well not perfect but try setting the vsync at Triple Buffer and fps limit to 40-41, as the Macbook Pro display is 120Hz the 40 fps should fit well.

I also noticed some polygon flickering not present in previous versions, so some changes were made to the render system.

I'm playing in a borderless window because the mouse pointer seems to be unreasonably tiny in standard fullscreen mode. It won't let you set an FPS limit unless you're in fullscreen.

It lets, I also play in borderless window and the option is enabled. Just check the square and set the bar. What is disabled is display refresh rate, but using the system one should be 120Hz on a Macbook Pro.

Oh, you're right. Thank you. I'll give it a go. Later though, as I should be working right now!

Just another testimony for the reference.

I have M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64gb of ram . On patch 6 and MacOS 14 the game ran mostly buttery smooth on ultra with any resolution (Act 3 as well).

On patch 7, hotfix 28 MacOS 15.1 the game runs very slowly with framerate drops and stuttering. While often fans are not even rotating. According to activity monitor the GPU is always 100% loaded.

I tried pretty much all fixes suggested above with no noticeable improvement.

Very much looking forward to the fix from Larian.

I have the same exact issue, and the same mac parameters. Patch 7 is pretty much unplayable. Patch 6 runs perfectly. I contacted Larian and only got some generic responses and assurance that "they're aware of the issue" but it's been a month since then and nothing improved.

The issue is definitely Patch #7, and Hotfix #28 did not resolve it.

macOS 14 + Patch #6 ran flawlessly for me (M3 Max). However, for both macOS 14.7 + macOS 15.1, Patch #7 is unplayable (went from 60fps to stuttery 45-ish fps).

Yeah, I've capped mine at 40 now as suggested and I'd be very happy with that if it was smooth, but it's not. It feels a bit better than it was uncapped but it's still stuttering.

I have M1 pro mbp and Sequoia beta. In my case the game was perfectly smooth for the first couple of minutes. But the frame drop happens just as the fans began to sound noisy.

I also have an M1 Max and was having the same issue as you. I think we both posted on r/macgaming as well. So I think I have a solution, I've had no issues since doing this.

- Ensure you're in performance mode in the energy settings
- Use Mac Fan Control to ensure the fans are at a constant 3500rpm (or higher) - I found that to be the sweet spot
- Play at Native resolution / 16:10 (assuming you're using the machines display) or whatever the native external display is
- Fullscreen mode
- Seetings high, no FSR
- Frame limit 40fps (if on internal display) or 30fps if on external 60hz display

This works for me. The issue seems to be if the screen resolution is not the same as the game resolution or in the same aspect ratio. You get a long lag every half second or so which is unbearable.

Yes, it's not just the 45fps it's the stutter that really makes it unplayable (have an M3 Max, same issue, starts smooth and then goes really bad).

But that's still unacceptable, BG3 is essentially broken for Mac uses since early October with no end in sight. It's more than a month.

Just wanted to add, I wanted to play this when I travel on my MBP (M3 Max 16C) while away from my gaming PC. Gave it a try today and it was a terrible experience. Even if I can get a solid 60 fps, the stuttering was out of this world, I don't know why or how this is happening lol but from this thread it looks normal...

just moving with WASD it stutters pretty badly, regardless of quality settings.

Borderless Fullscreen or Fullscreen made no difference btw.

This is just so out of character for Larian to ignore this... I mean, they have always been so supportive of the community. It probably is true that Mac-players are a small group, but a single tweet, like, Mac users we see you, bear with us... and some Halsin meme... would be nice. Instead, not a word of attention while some of us cannot play their favorite game in the world for so long. With no solution in sight and completely no clue on when to even expect it.

I hope they are coming with patch soon. It has become unplayable. I had a huge gap this year on playing the game...and after i started playing it again few days ago, i was shocked how bad was the performance! I tried all possible settings, nothing helped! I even went to the extent of thinking about upgrading my M2 MAX (32GB / 38 GPU) to an M4 MAX believing that somehow my "old" laptop is at fault... Luckily i kept searching and found out they totally destroyed MAC version with their latest patches.

So true. I'm dealing with a lot of mental health crap due to material conditions (and the material conditions themselves, obviously), and BG3 was the only thing that made my existence a tiny bit brighter. Now even being able to play an older version of the game doesn't help, because apparently Larian are the same as any other run-of-the-mill corporate entity.

For what's worth there seems to be a work around:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/...remedy_for_baldurs_gate_3_patch_7s_poor/

But it's already 1.5 month since BG3 was broken on macOS. Not only the platform is left in this state for so long, but also the fact it was broken with Patch 7 means there's little to no testing taking place on macOS.