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.