Report on running FGU on Apple Silicon based mac mini

[RaviDesai]

Hey just wanted to put a shout out to the amazing team here on Fantasy Grounds. My ARM (Apple Silicon) based mac mini just arrived today, and as I was hoping to make it my primary TT RPG gaming system, I immediately loaded FGU, Discord (and Discord Canary), and the Syrinscape Fantasy Player on it (in addition to all my gaming related content).

FGU installed and ran without a hitch, and even though it's translated through Rosetta 2, actually runs faster and smoother than it does on my 2017 Macbook Pro with the same amount of RAM (16GB) and a 3.1GHz Core i7. Discord, Discord Canary, and Syrinscape all ran with without a hitch as well. I'm hoping to have an opportunity to run a full blown game on it soon, but so far I'm impressed at how well all of this x86 software runs on an ARM-based computer.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post something like this, but I thought I'd share my experiences as I'm thinking there may be a few others that are interested in this configuration as well.

[Alamo Melt]

I came to the forums to see if anyone had tested it on the ARM chip - encouraging results. Over the summer, the combat tracker pegged the CPU on my 27" iMac and kicked the fan on high so I started booting into Windows 10 to use FG. Any sense of that still being an issue?

[Imagix]

Hey.. you're making me a little jealous! My MacBook Pro is kinda aging... but it still works thus I'm loathe to retire it just because.

[Dire Weasel]

It works very well now on my older iMac. The fan is pretty much silent.

[RaviDesai]

Almost no fan noise whatsoever on my ARM based mini. On my MacBook Pro from 2017, that's a different issue. By the time I have a full blown game running, I have to use headphones just so the fan noise doesn't take over the microphone.

The combat tracker didn't peg my CPU at all (on either my 5e or 2e games) but I also didn't have a full combat running with 15 NPCs and 3-6 players either.

[Dimwhit]

I can confirm. I've been on my weekly session for a couple hours now. It runs amazing on my M1 Mini. So much better than it did on my old one. My fan has yet to go off (took about 30 seconds on my old Mini before the fan turned on). I really hope we get a Universal version that is native to the M1, but in the meantime, this is amazing.

[vaughnlannister]

Nice, I'm on a macbook air 2020 without the M1 chip and hope there will still be some last optimisation, that would decrease some lag and CPU use.
The /vsync 1 update did help a bit though.

[ajseesink]

I'm still waiting for my MacBook Air M1. But good to hear you tested it. I hope a native Apple Silicon version will be compiled for us Apple lovers.

[dbm]

That’s really good to hear - thanks for sharing your experience