Conan Exiles is a survival game built on Unreal Engine 4. It was never released for macOS, but thanks to CrossOver and Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit (D3DMetal), you can still get it running. The big question is: how well does it actually run on a Mac?
First Impressions
The game launches without major issues. The menu works, but as often happens with Unreal Engine on Wine/GPTK, there are some bugs with video playback – intro videos or animated backgrounds sometimes fail to render properly. It’s not game-breaking, but it looks a bit glitchy.
Singleplayer vs Multiplayer
Unfortunately, multiplayer on the official servers doesn’t work on macOS because of the BattlEye anticheat. BattlEye cannot run under Wine/GPTK, so the game is limited to:
- Singleplayer
- Private servers without BattlEye
For solo play, this is perfectly fine – singleplayer works and is stable.
Performance on macOS
Performance is the biggest question. On High settings, the game runs at around 30–40 FPS. Playable, but not ideal.
With a few tweaks, however, the framerate improves significantly:
- Post Processing → Low
This gives the biggest FPS boost. With this change, the game runs at 40–60 FPS, which feels much smoother. - Shadows → Medium/Low
Shadows are demanding and also prone to flickering under Wine. Lowering them stabilizes performance.
Overall, with the right tweaks, Conan Exiles can hold a stable 40–60 FPS on macOS – which is surprisingly good for an older Unreal Engine 4 title running through a translation layer.
Bugs and Limitations
- Missing models – sometimes animals or NPCs fail to load, leaving only shadows. This issue may be resolved with macOS Tahoe, which introduces improved shader handling.
- Video playback bugs – intro movies and menu videos may not work.
- Official multiplayer servers unavailable – BattlEye blocks the client on macOS.
Conclusion
Conan Exiles on macOS with CrossOver and D3DMetal runs better than expected. Singleplayer is fully playable, and with the right settings you can achieve 40–60 FPS while keeping visuals decent.
Yes, there are bugs in the menus and occasional missing models, and official multiplayer is out of reach due to anticheat. But for solo survival or private servers, Conan Exiles is absolutely playable on a Mac in 2025.
