[2022] Performance update, GeForce NOW and important information for MacOS players

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello everyone!

The next Barotrauma update is coming in early October, and among other things, it will include a big change under the hood: we’re updating our .NET runtime to a new version, and this should yield significant performance gains. Combined with the ongoing optimization work, the .NET runtime update will help to make the game run considerably more smoothly for most players.

GeForce NOW

Another exciting change is bringing Barotrauma to Nvidia’s cloud gaming platform GeForce NOW[www.nvidia.com]. While this will have no impact on those who can run Barotrauma on their systems currently, it will open possibilities for players on officially unsupported systems to get into playing. We’ve received a number of requests about this over the years and are happy to be making it happen now – you’ll find Barotrauma on GFN in the coming weeks.

To MacOS players

Unfortunately the mentioned runtime update comes with a downside for players on older Mac systems: because the .NET 6 runtime does not support MacOS older than 10.15, Barotrauma will not be able to support versions 10.13 and 10.14 either, and we need to raise our official minimum technical requirements to match.

We’re very sorry to be cutting support for systems we have previously supported, but this change is inevitable: as the runtime is a core technology that the game relies on, and it has already dropped support for these systems on its end, we will have to follow suit sooner or later. We’ve decided to go through with the runtime update now, while still in early access, rather than later when it might affect a larger number of players.

Compatibility branch

To help the affected Mac players continue having access to Barotrauma, we’re creating a compatibility branch which allows MacOS 10.13 and 10.14 users to keep playing the current version of the game. To our knowledge, 10.14 users should also be able to update their systems to stay compatible.

Additionally, the GeForce NOW access should help bridge the gap for players on the affected operating systems, and we hope these measures put together will take the worst of the edge off. MacOS 10.15 or newer, or other operating systems, should not experience any difficulties with the new runtime.


We’ll be back with more news about the update over the coming weeks. Stay tuned, and let us know in the comments if you have any questions!