Poor performance on Mac (M2 Pro/16 GB RAM)

[Grabeq]

I really waited eagerly for this patch, but the performance on Mac is disspapointing.

I have MacBook Pro 14" with 10 cores/16 cores M2 Pro CPU. In the the Inn in Act 2 the game runs at 25-28 FPS. It's a bit better in the towers. Yes I set the graphics to high/ultra (1440p) but even on medium BG3 hits about 35 FPS. FSR doesn't help too.

What is your experience? According to Mac recommended specs, I should me more than fine playing on high.

Perfectly playable on retina, with peculiar 912p resolution. It seems that 1440p on my external monitor is a bit too demanding for M2 Pro.

[雁飞残月天]

i have a 13.6 mac air with m2 and 16g internal storage，But I had to adjust the resolution to 1600 by 900 and the picture quality to a low level to start the game, and I felt very sluggish, and I was disappointed that I had two flashes in an hour, not even the performance of the beta

[tbonekilla]

M2 Max 32GB 4K resolution 120hz everything on ultra or highest setting. Seems fine. I have slow HDD on also so it ramdisk's everything. This is a Mac Studio though. Maybe it's the RAM size and thermal throttling?

Last Light Inn does slow down a little.

[Elliedo]

Is the stuttering just the resolution problem? My friend is having an issue on his M2 16gb Mac book pro. It’s stuttering so bad it’s unplayable. All the specs should be fine to play on, but the stutter is insufferable. He says he tried the resolution settings and it didn’t help much. Anything else we can think of ? Low and high settings tested - no help. Launcher settings checked and no help. There has to be a way to fix it

[skivis]

You mentioned you use an external monitor. I'm no computer expert, but my understanding is that certain resolutions in the external monitor can put extra burden on the computer (like enlarging and cropping). FYI: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/
Using the above link, you can determine if you're using a resolution suitable for the mac.

[lily40k]

Originally posted by Grabeq:

I really waited eagerly for this patch, but the performance on Mac is disspapointing.

I have MacBook Pro 14" with 10 cores/16 cores M2 Pro CPU. In the the Inn in Act 2 the game runs at 25-28 FPS. It's a bit better in the towers. Yes I set the graphics to high/ultra (1440p) but even on medium BG3 hits about 35 FPS. FSR doesn't help too.

What is your experience? According to Mac recommended specs, I should me more than fine playing on high.

Perfectly playable on retina, with peculiar 912p resolution. It seems that 1440p on my external monitor is a bit too demanding for M2 Pro.

I"m not a picky person, anything above 30 is playable for me unless its a shooter or a racer...
But do you see 35 in act 1 for example?

I think the problem here is they load the whole dense city area at once and render things at once, there seems to be no dynamic load/render. I cant think of any other explanation for running on low and still getting the same frames...

[QRG]

Macbook Pro M2PRO here, 10CPU 16GPU. Running consistently 40-60fps on mostly ultra/very high.

But I can't take a screenshot or see anything regarding the steam overlay that ♥♥♥♥ looks insane, full of artefacts and glitches

[deadwood]

M1 Max, 64Gb RAM, playing comfortably at Ultra settings....

there are some weird artefacts on cut-scenes though.... some kind of dots or something, probably fixable in the settings, but the game itself runs smoothly (I haven't yet reached act 3 though)

[deadwood]

PS: also using an external monitor.... the save loading in like 10 secs or so

[DarkSch666]

My recommendation is that if want performance always activate FSR on Quality mode, then SMAA or TAA depending if want a more sharpen or smooth image.

I play on a Mac Mini M1 with 16GB and use 1080p, settings auto-detect increasing texture quality to med and filter to AFx2, FSR Quality and SMAA. The framerate is solid even at sequences which using native resolution drops a good amount. So enabled the triple buffer with cap to 30 fps and the game runs smooth at solid 30 fps with vsync.

It is not the best as FSR 1, you know. Waiting for them to implement FSR 2. The best would be the native MetalFX Upscaling, but I doubt we will have it.

[DarkSch666]

Well after some more testing, I'd change the FSR Quality (x1.5) by Performance (x2) mode increasing the resolution. Using 1440p FSR Performance performs the same than 1080p FSR Quality, as the gameplay render resolution is the same (720p) but having a sharper GUI.
Also as the scaling is integer (x2) it just render like in native with no scaling artifacts, as FSR 1 is not as advanced as 2 just scaling the image without additional data.

So for Pro chip users, probably the best would be resolution to 4K and FSR Performance to have the sharpest GUI (which in a game like this is good) and gameplay rendering just like native 1080p, so all your High/Ultra settings should run smooth.

[topetepeterson]

Macbook Pro M1 here. I don't recall the settings, but it looks and runs great, well above 30fps. Act III runs just as well as Acts I & II. I know that's not helpful, but hoping it means there's something that'll work. I play in windowed mode, if that matters.

[Thermalsock]

I have a Mac Mini Pro M2 and it runs like a dream on ultra, blew me away as i expected it to be meh

[Ivanfrost]

are you guys running this on Parallels? or is there a direct Mac OS Download?

[DarkSch666]

Originally posted by Ivanfrost:

are you guys running this on Parallels? or is there a direct Mac OS Download?

This game has native version for Mac.

With the latest update (yesterday) no sure if they modified how TAA works (maybe the jitter computation?) but now setting FSR on Balanced with TAA looks much better and the performance gain is noticeable. So if want to get some extra performance set any non-integer FSR (so discard Performance mode) with TAA.
We still have the issue of AA disabling by its own each time the game is launched if FSR is enabled.

[DarkSch666]

Hi, some updates. Watched this interesting video

Seems for Mac they already selected their "best" settings, so only have to click on auto-detect, then change:
- Resolution.
- Enable triple buffering and set fps cap to your display refresh rate or half (so typically 60 or 30), seems Mac get a good advantage from this.
- Choose AA, I'd recommend TAA to avoid grainy graphics. If using TAA, for lower resolutions is recommended to enable Fidelity FX and set sharpness to half of greater.
- Some other minor changes: i.e. I have M1 but with 16GB RAM, so I change textures to High and texture filtering to AF2x. Could set even texture to Ultra without performance penalty (because mipmaps) but at that resolution (1600x900) there is no noticeable enhancement, so on High I suppose they load faster.

Notice that FSR is disabled, they recommend not using it on Mac.
Made some tests and I am getting the same performance rendering at native 900p than FSR 768p (1152p with FSR Quality), so it must be true. I lose some HUD clarity but in general looks better.

Also around the minute 11 of the video there are other settings for different Mac models.