Picked up the Mac version of BL3 from the Epic store this morning, here are my initial impressions. This is on a 2019 15 inch MacBook Pro (where I run all BL versions).
Graphics - Beautiful.
Performance - I’m getting stuttering in the graphics loads and movement. It’s annoying, but at least playable. I’ll see if I can tweak this a little more, I’ve got graphics set low, but I may set the texture streaming inbound setting a little higher.
Interface - Oh my gosh, I don’t know what you other PC players did when you first loaded this, the text and minimap are tiny by default, I couldn’t read anything or see red dots on the minimap. Tweaking accessibility and setting the HUD scaling to maximum fixed it, but you need to do that immediately.
Controls- Fine. And the sensitivity settings for movement/aiming are very fine grained, I was able to set it to my liking quickly. Setting key bindings took a bit simply because the text is so tiny I had to put my face 6 inches from the screen to read what I was setting.
Fans - Spins my fans somewhat, but actually less than BL2 at high graphic quality, so OK.
So it’s fine, I’ll be playing it when I’m on the road happily.
–RoA
Mine has the Radeon Pro 560X inside (as well as intel integrated UHD Graphics 630, of course).
I actually didn’t turn graphics switching off before I ran, I’ll do that and see if it smooths the graphics a little.
And something was up with my mouse that may have contributed to some jerkiness, after I quit my mouse pointer was still a little jerky, turned it off and on and it smoothed out.
Oh, and even though the cut scenes are still not skip-able, at least they keep playing when you switch out to mail or safari, so you’re not stuck watching them.
–RoA
The text and map are also small on console. Especially weapon cards. There is no way to enlarge them on ps4. Only option we have is to enlarge dialog and cc.
I’m curious: Did you already have the game for Windows and have to buy again for Mac? Or can someone buy the game once on EGS and install on either Mac or PC?
My primary machine is macOS Mojave, but I have a Windows 10 machine as well and would like to have the option of installing on both.
Dumb as it sounds I turned Texture Streaming up to ultra and it stopped the stuttering.
My primary issue right now is I cannot get a controller to work right. Either via native bluetooth or using the frantic rain wired driver. The button mappings are all messed up but work fine in other games so it seems to be Borderlands 3 specific.
Pretty sure it’s the same as on Steam; You usually get the game for all platforms with a single purchase, if available. People who had already bought it on EPIC for Windows should be getting the Mac version as well, now that it’s out.
After a few weeks of trying, BL3 does not really work playable on this MacBook Pro, I can’t recommend it. I’m not particularly going to ding it since laptop use is generally not they way they test (though BL2 & 1 work fine).
Of course I just ordered a new 16 inch MacBook Pro with a large amount of memory and a 4 terabyte drive and a AMD Radeon Pro 5500M, so I expect playability.
Also, with 4 Tbyte of storage I plan to create a 1 Tbyte Bootcamp partition and install Winders so I can fall back on Epic or Steam on the windows side.
–RoA
I was happy that I didn’t have to dish out another $140CAD to buy it on Mac. The problem for me is that I can’t play it on my two Macs without booting into Windows. One is a 2013 Macbook Pro with a Nvidia GeForce 750M with 4GB of RAM and the other is a 2017 iMac 27" with a Radeon Pro 580 with 8GB of RAM. Laptop has 16GB of system RAM and my iMac has 32GB of system RAM. Both have Apple SSD drives built in and running Mojave.
I have turned everything to low and under Windows 10 at the game’s lowest resolution of 1280X720 it’s playable (for me) at about 25 frames per second on both machines although the visuals look a little crappy. With the same settings, it’s unplayable on the Macs. I didn’t bother testing the frame rate since I could barely move.
I really appreciate that GB is one of the few companies that makes quality games available to the Mac platform almost at the same time as the PC ones, so thank you GB. B1-3 are my favorite games and I look forward to the day that I’ll be getting a dedicated gaming PC that will allow me to enjoy the awesome graphics.
BTW, the installer took over the entire system for the duration of downloading and installing and even though I could switch to other apps like Firefox, none of the links worked and could not do much. Same for all other open programs. It was like I was back in 1989. Also cannot hide game or switch to another app when in full screen mode. Command+tab goes to inventory when in the game. Cmd+H does nothing.
I am (more like was) playing the game on a Late 2018 15" MBP with 32GB and a Vega 20 card.
Performance is terrible on the OSX side compared to the Windows side on the same hardware. It is a bit frustrating, especially considering the performance Aspyr was able to showcase in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider port that released early November. The minimum requirements on the mac side are the recommended specs for the Windows side, and that just speaks to poor optimization.
I am wondering why this title would not have gone through the usual Feral or Aspyr channels for porting to the platform. A several month wait that produced some parity between Win and OSX would have been preferable to an immediate, flawed release that only like 10 percent of a 10 percent userbase can actually play without an eGPU. 8GB of VRAM as the minimum requirements on OSX vs. 7 year old 2GB cards for windows?
This is trying to pass a runny poop sandwich off as Sloppy Joe.
Update:
I just created a 500 gbyte partition and installed Windows 10 through Bootcamp on this 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro.
Downloaded Epic & BL3 through my account, and it works very very well. Much better than the Mac port, smooth and very fast.
So if you have a MacBook and disk space to put Winders on it, the BL3 performance is very acceptable.
–RoA
