Apple Silicon support will be required in 2 years.

[MrDDT]

@jaharmi The reason Balder's Gate and FG are similar is that FG is not usually just running text and simple graphics. With FG most of the GPU power is being used to calculate LOS and what should be visibility clipped or not clipped for every creature and player on the combat tracker. The most predictive of how much calculation the GPU power needs is the pixel size, number of colors of the map and number and complexity of the LOS oculars.

Then, if you are running two instances of FG you are basically doubling the load on the GPU to run both the GM copy and Player copy at the same time.

You might see some improvements if you Disable Line-of-sight or Disable Lighting. Disabling lighting can be really viable with outdoor maps in daylight.

Negative, BG runs both of these also, both NPC and PC. What it comes down to is it's better coded in how it handles these things. It's able to limit down better what needs to be loaded and what doesn't. What needs to be processed and what doesn't.

Mostly this comes from well written maps. Whereas FG has to use different calcs because each map is a custom map.

Yes a lot of GPU in FG VTT is being used on LOS and Lighting, but it's not the reason you are stating.

[Griogre]

I thought I said most of FG GPU's use was LOS and lighting? And running two copies of the program? What reason am I missing?

[eriktedesco]

Hi all and I apologize for barging in the discussion without any technical suggestion to solve the issue at hand.
I'm planning on switching to a M4 MacBook Air in the next few months. And what I just read is worring me a bit (more than a bit actually).
Since I'm DMing a couple of D&D campaign with FGU, am I safe in switching to an Apple M4 laptop?

[Nylanfs]

Fairly sure that John works on a Mac, so the problem would eventually get solved.

[Moon Wizard]

Apple native silicon support is available in FG v4.8.0.

Regards,
JPG

[caution]

OMG! Thank you! This is great. Just launched it and it's taking up 15%...of ONE CPU core and less than 1GB RAM! *MASSIVE* improvement for those of us on MacOS!

Apple native silicon support is available in FG v4.8.0.

Regards,
JPG

[BergQuester]

�� Wow! I didn't expect a release this soon. Thank you!

Apple native silicon support is available in FG v4.8.0.

Regards,
JPG

[jaharmi]

I just tried to install Fantasy Grounds in a Mac VM (running on my Mac) for $reasons. I still needed Rosetta in order to install and update the game.

The FGUWebInstall.pkg needed it. I’m not sure if this was due to something declared — or not declared, as I believe that can make a difference — in the .pkg installer, or due to something that tries to run during the installation (the updater app).

It’s still updating for me in the VM, but I can see the FantasyGroundsUpdater is _definitely_ showing up as Intel, rather than Universal. On the more updated install on the host Mac, the FantasyGroundsUpdater is also still an Intel executable.

For a better first-run experience on macOS with Apple Silicon, the installer .pkg and the FantasyGroundsUpdater should be verified on Apple Silicon and updated as necessary.

The .pkg installer may just need some updated metadata. I haven’t looked further into the installer to see if it suffers from this.

The FantasyGroundsUpdater would need to be compiled as a Universal Binary to support Intel and Apple Silicon; this would help with current Mac support and is absolutely necessary for future support (by this fall). Since the updater is needed for all update actions — along with the initial install — I would suggest that compiling/distributing it as Universal as soon as possible should be a priority for Smiteworks for continued Mac support. (That said, I personally wish the initial installation would install the latest build of Fantasy Grounds directly to disk using the .pkg payload, rather than running the updater app.)

Note that Apple already announced that macOS 27 won’t run on Intel Macs and that Rosetta 2 will have limited availability (and only for certain games, which is not likely to include FGU’s updater). I’m sure there will be more details regarding those existing announcements coming next week at Apple WWDC 2026. However, the situation is already quite clear in that apps need to support Apple Silicon fully to continue to work on macOS.

[Moon Wizard]

The FantasyGroundsUpdater binary is a very small program that just launches other programs (main updater engine); so it's not necessary to port at this time.
We will resolve any issues as they arise to make sure everything is still working.

The main client and updater applications are already universal MacOS binaries.

Regards,
JPG

[jaharmi]

Replied in the other thread I started, since that was more relevant.

That thread also tried to explain that if FantasyGroundsUpdater is in any critical path, it is important now and will probably be increasingly important for FG on Mac starting on Monday (Apple WWDC 26, with beta OSes for developers expected) and especially this fall.