And mind you, Yoshida's talking about if FF XIV was remade as an OS X native game. Thirty percent is a big nut, and it's a pretty good indication of just how bad things are on the Mac today when it comes to performance parity with Windows games. If FFXIV were to be developed in native OpenGL for Mac OS, it is expected that there would be a performance gap of approximately 30% compared the DirectX version. Yoshida confirmed this but went further, throwing under the bus OpenGL, the graphics technology employed by OS X: They have the reputation for not running as fast as a game that's been programmed with native support for OS X's graphics drivers.

Mac gamers often look down their nose at Cider-based games. They made it someone else's problem in the process. That's why they did a Cider port, according to Yoshida. Square Enix knew from the start that not a lot of Mac users were going to play Final Fantasy XIV compared to their Windows counterparts, so they wanted to do the Mac version's development on the cheap. Cider has been used for years to make Mac game ports. It's a translation technology developed by a Canadian outfit called TransGaming, which recently sold Cider to Nvidia. Yoshida went pretty far down the rabbit hole to explain.Īmong the problems Yoshida cited is Final Fantasy XIV's reliance on Cider. There's a lot more to this than just a case of mistaken system requirements, though.

They're offering refunds to those Mac users who don't want to wait.

He said that he plans to keep the Mac version from being sold until the company can better articulate Macs system requirements. Yoshida lays the problem at the feet of changing system requirements late in development.

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