Hey folks,
The particle density situation is a work around. We’ve confirmed that this appears to be a driver level bug, which means that we cannot fix it and need someone else to do so, as we don’t create drivers for your graphics cards. We’re telling the GPU to do something it’s supposed to be able to do, but due to a bug with the driver’s coding, your machine is getting into a bad state. We added new particle effects with 8.3, but it’s not the core cause, just the trigger for the driver bug.
Being able to disable particle density is a work around that we put in until updated drivers/a new mac OS build are released which fix the problem so that you all can at least play. We’ve already reported the issue to intel. At this time if you are having this problem, you should disable particle density by following the steps that are recommended here. If we hear that a build of mac OS has been resolved which fixes the issue, we’ll let you know.