On April 14, 2024, the XIV on Mac team has unfortunately made the decision to drop support for all Intel-based Macs while we prepare for the coming Dawntrail benchmark and expansion. Square Enix has also done the same for the official Final Fantasy XIV launcher.
There are a number of technical reasons why we can no longer properly support running the game on Intel-based Macs:
- Lack of updates - the graphics drivers used by Intel-based Macs are no longer receiving any new features or bug fixes from Apple, making the game increasingly unstable on these Macs.
- Thermal and performance limitations - the processors that shipped with the last generation of Intel-based Macs are now several years old, and a number of users on these systems are already struggling with both thermal throttling and performance bottlenecks on the current Endwalker expansion. With Dawntrail set to receive a graphics overhaul, performance on Intel will likely drop further to an unplayable degree.
- Lack of available QA devices - as a community project, the XIV on Mac team have a limited number of devices available to test against. Our team now mainly own Apple Silicon-based Macs, meaning we have no Intel-based Macs to test future work against. This makes it difficult to reproduce issues that only occur on Intel.
While this doesn't necessarily mean that XIV on Mac will suddenly stop working if you're running it on an Intel-based Mac, the XIV on Mac team will not be providing any support via Discord or performing any pre-release testing for running the game on Intel processors.
Going forward, XIV on Mac will only support Apple Silicon-based Macs (anything with an Apple M1 chip or newer).
We sincerely apologise if you're affected by this - especially if you were looking forward to Dawntrail and aren't currently in a position to upgrade.