HippieJoel.9537

Give them some time - I'm sure they can work on getting the dependencies up and running in 64 bit.

I honestly wouldn't worry about the use of CoherentUI. If they've given the code and related libraries to Anet then it stands to reason that it shouldn't be too involved to port it over to 64-bit and get it working. It's just understandably not a priority. Truth be told (and I promise I don't mean to fearmonger with this) but my guess is that ArenaNet don't have anyone working on the Mac client as such, but that isn't really an issue - my understanding is that Jon's work essentially allowed the Windows client to be cross-compiled for macOS from the same codebase, meaning that as long as the Windows client is maintained, the Mac client will be too. The real question is how API-agnostic the game's renderer is - when they start adding in say, new graphical features, how well that'll port over to OpenGL, but regardless, I wouldn't worry.

Do we know that is the only 32 bit dependency in the 64 bit app? If so does anyone know if there is a workaround? Yes, I think it is the only 32 bit process when GW2 is running. What does the process do though? Given I only see the message now and then though I wonder if it is something we can live without?I don't work for ArenaNet and I could very easily be wrong but my understanding is that the CoherentUIHost is used for things like the Black Lion Trading Post. Essentially it allows them to embed Google Chrome within the game for showing web content without having to open a separate browser. It should be fairly straightforward to swap it out for a 64-bit version but then I don't work for ArenaNet so couldn't say for sure.

Don't - the Mac Pro is about 4 years old now and you'd be much, much better served by an iMac (even the standard 5k one - not the Pro), especially for gaming as the higher clock speed will give much better single-threaded performance (which matters for Guild Wars 2). Personally I'm using a hackintosh but if I was using a real Mac I'd almost certainly go for the 5k iMac.

No. There are technical limitations which prevent a 64bit wine wrapper from working on macOS, mostly due to significant differences in processor architecture. Also, your problems are not universal. The 64bit client works very nicely for me, much better than the 32 bit one, ignoring some graphical glitches which don't impact gameplay. Worth mentioning that the 64-bit client works wonderfully for me, but it absolutely is possible to get 64-bit Wine working on macOS. So basically you are right that there are differences in how macOS deals with CPU registers on x64 compared to how Windows does, but as it turns out simply ignoring the problem works rather well. In addition, Wine on macOS now uses a pre-loader which allows it to work around the issue. So if you do feel like running the Windows version of Guild Wars 2 on macOS via 64-bit Wine, you absolutely can. Though that said, I wouldn't recommend it - the native 64-bit client is vastly superior.

I'm running the client just about maxed out on my hackintosh (i7-4790k / GTX 970 with very few issues. Main ones I've noticed are that ambient occlusion can look a bit off at times (glowing character + lighting on the ground changes as I move the camera) and I get some... interesting graphical bugs (i.e. things flickering white) if I set shaders to high. Otherwise it really runs perfectly - I haven't experienced the crashes etc that other people are experiencing so I guess I should consider myself very lucky. Performance is really rather good - not far off the Windows client at all with the exception of the hitching, particularly when I first open the game. Really though, I can't tell you just how happy I am with the current state of the Mac client. Even for those who are having issues, it seems to be so much better than the previous 32-bit Cider wrapper. I mean, to give some context to others, prior to this testing client being a thing I'd rather play the game just using Wine, even with the performance hit, before giving up and booting into Windows every now and then. Since this came out I've actually just gone ahead and wiped my Windows SSD which I now use for additional storage for video editing etc.

I must say I often feel that I am alone in genuinely finding that the game runs really well for me on my system. It's not quite up there with the performance of Windows yet but the game is more than playable, so thank you to the wonderful developers at ArenaNet. With that said, I am not an engine dev and to be perfectly honest with you I'm fairly clueless about OpenGL and Metal in general so I wouldn't be surprised if someone who is experienced with game engine development tells me that I'm entirely wrong about everything.

Yes. DirectX doesn't exist for macOS and Guild Wars 2 does not support Metal at this time.

I'm honestly surprised that people have had such a negative experience with the 64-bit Mac client. I certainly wouldn't say that things have been perfect but I honestly pretty much refused to play the game with the 32-bit one, whilst finding the 64-bit client, whilst certainly not perfect, to actually be a pretty big improvement all things considered. Doesn't run as well as Windows but is definitely playable and having seen the patches I'm genuinely optimistic for the future. It doesn't support Metal at all so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. It uses an OpenGL renderer. It's not impossible that they would add Metal support later but the amount of work required is well, not insignificant.

A thousand times this. I absolutely love to complain and I admit the performance isn't where I'd like it to be all of the time but for the most part it runs really, really well. I actually stopped playing the game for a while previously because of the issues with the Mac client but with the current one? It's not perfect but it's absolutely playable and for the most part I am very, very happy with how things are going. I'm actually playing on a hackintosh because I'm mental - i7-4790k / Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 / 1TB SSD.

In fairness it's no secret that the Mac client is very much a work in progress. I'm optimistic that it'll improve with time (and the client seems to be steadily improving already), and in all fairness, nobody buys a Mac expecting excellent gaming performance. With that said, I likely won't buy PoF until performance improves or until I can be bothered to dual boot Windows (I stopped recently because I decided I'd rather just have the extra disk space). The performance is pretty poor already in HoT areas - I dread to think what the PoF zones will do to the Mac client. A part of me wants to joke about you not knowing how good you have things - as someone who has played Guild Wars 2 since launch honestly, the situation is a million times better now with the native testing client than it once was, having the choice of Wine where the performance was subpar or the official Cider port which had poor quality audio, didn't support windowed fullscreen mode (fullscreen mode would turn your other monitors black - as someone with 3 monitors this was upsetting) and simply didn't look nearly as nice graphically as what we have now.

The 64-bit client does not use WINE. It is a native Mac client. The low performance is a combination of things, namely the fact that the Mac client still has issues that are actively being investigated and the fact that OpenGL unfortunately has less than stellar performance on macOS. Metal in theory could improve performance a fair bit (particularly where shader compilation is a factor) but it would involve pretty much rewriting the entire renderer which I can't imagine ArenaNet are in any rush to do because it'd be a huge amount of work. Be patient - it will improve. The answer is most likely no and as I understand it people running Windows won't be able to play Guild Wars 2 using the 32-bit client either, as PoF requires more memory than a 32-bit client could address due to the improved graphics in the PoF zones. Regardless I think it's unlikely that the Cider based client would perform particularly well in the PoF zones anyway. I suspect that these issues are at least in part down to the disk IO issue that is currently present in the 64-bit client and which ArenaNet are investigating. There's a good chance that once this is resolved it will improve dramatically. I suspect this in part because, in my desktop and my MacBook Pro (both of which have SSDs) the performance is quite a lot better than what you describe.

In fairness, even if it hasn't I'd still be reasonably confident that it should work without any major issues. The biggest changes on a technical level are the introduction of the APFS filesystem (which is a bit more low level than what should affect Guild Wars 2) and Metal 2 (but Guild Wars 2 uses OpenGL). That said, my understanding is that the beta of High Sierra is available to those who want it so I'm sure there's someone here who has tested with it and can confirm whether or not we can expect anything to break.

Not at this time. We are still investigating it. Good to hear. I hate to complain but looking at activity monitor the amount of data the client reads is absolutely insane and makes me genuinely concerned about what it's doing to my poor SSD. That said, I will say that the performance of the Mac client has absolutely been improving lately, which is wonderful.