First Metal benchmarks arrive

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

It's not looking good at the moment. Metal is beaten by OpenGL in a lot of tests in GFXBench. When you consider how slow and old OS X's OpenGL is compared to Direct X this will help bring realistic expectations so people don't get angry later on.

But it's still early days. I don't expect an API ported from iOS to make Macs competitive with a PC overnight, if ever. Even the iPhone 6S tests included below show Metal having no real world advantage over OpenGL.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/1...-os-x-el-capitan-sometimes-great-often-mixed/

'For whatever reason, the OpenGL version of GFXBench consistently beats the Metal version in the T-Rex, ALU, and Texturing tests. And usually it’s not winning by a little, it’s winning by a lot. We’ve asked Apple about these results, but the immediate takeaway is that there are some things that OpenGL is going to do better than Metal can, at least for now.

Metal, on the other hand, excels where you would expect it to. The Driver Overhead test “approximates the graphics driver’s CPU load when running the Manhattan high-level test,” which is right up Metal’s alley, since one of the API’s goals is to process more on the GPU so that the CPU is free to handle physics or AI'

 

[iBug2]

It's way too early. I'm just waiting for Blizzard to enable Metal on WoW to see what kind of real world difference it makes. They already have it up and running and said that it should be out before the end of the year.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

It's way too early. I'm just waiting for Blizzard to enable Metal on WoW to see what kind of real world difference it makes. They already have it up and running and said that it should be out before the end of the year.

I read their tech guys talk about it on their forum but it appears they want to downplay expectations too. Apple should put a version number after Metal to indicate progression in the same way MS does with Direct X. I would never compare a new 1.0 API with a very mature 12.0 API.

 

[PHel67]

When you consider how slow and old OS X's OpenGL is compared to Direct X this will help bring realistic expectations so people don't get angry later on.

This says a lot about Apple's priorities. OpenGL may be old and mature, but a decent implementation of the latest spec is a very potent graphics platform. There are for example apps that perform better on top of Nvidia's hardware-accelerated OpenGL implementation on Linux that it does on top of Windows+DX on the same hardware.

I also suspect that current miserable performance has a lot to do with inadequate GPU drivers. The list of hardware supported by Nvidia's latest driver for OS X is anything but impressive. A lot of GPUs used in fairly recent (last 2-3 years) macs is still missing from the list.