OS X Mac Gaming is Awesome!

[N19h7m4r3]

It's true that NVIDIA makes the best drivers by far - I already addressed this. The problem is that OS X does not ship with NVIDIA's driver. Apple writes their own driver, and it blows on NVIDIA cards. You sound like someone who has installed CUDA, so you won't see this problem - lucky you. Unfortunately, the CUDA drivers can cause issues when updating OS X because the drivers don't update with it. You see similar issues on Linux.

Those drivers are the base NVIDIA ones inside OSX I used.

You seem rather bitter about Unigine for some reason, there's a reason it's a standardised test.

Also Windows shipping with stripped OpenGL is incorrect, since the performance depends on NVIDIA or AMD's drivers that supply the new version. The only time the Windows OpenGL drivers are used is if you haven't installed your GPU's drivers from NV, AMD, or Intel. Generic Windows drivers are bad. NVIDIA has conformed with Khronos 4.4 shortly after it was established.

Who do you think has a wildly divergent OpenGL path and didn't include OpenGL 3.0 until Snow Leopard, forcing developers to continue using the 2.0/2.1 path for far too long whether they wanted to or not?

That's right: Apple!

Oh? Apple caused those devs to stay on 2/2.1 in Linux and Windows? How interesting. Do you have links?

Until that changes, Mac gaming will continue to be laughed at. Sorry 'bout that.

Laughed at so much it has more games than all the next gen consoles combined, and support for Epic, Unity, Crytek, CDProjeckt Red, and many top graphics engine developers, and games developers.

When Wolfenstein arrives on Mac I'll gladly compare the Windows and OSX performance for OpenGL.

I find it interesting that ONLY with OSX gaming do people Always blame Apple for everything.
Yet on Windows, Microsoft never get anything thrown their way. You don't see them being blamed for Watch Dogs Or Wolfenstein, yet if a game runs badly on OSX it's Apple.
Never the developer. It's a shame there's such a duality.

Sure DX11 has more features than OpenGL4.0/1 but not 100% of them are Ever used. I the majority of games aren't 100% DX11 only, there's always a mishmash of DX9-11 in there for computability.

 

[edddeduck]

I find it interesting that ONLY with OSX gaming do people Always blame Apple for everything.
Yet on Windows, Microsoft never get anything thrown their way. You don't see them being blamed for Watch Dogs, yet if a game runs badly on OSX it's Apple.
Never the developer. It's a shame there's such a duality.

That's not completely true being a developer, I have found the opposite happens just as much depending on the forum and thread. If performance isn't the same as Windows's it's a shoddy port, if a game is released people thank "Apple" or "Valve" instead of the developer.

The truth is as usual a lot more complex, there can be many reasons for poor performance in a port from the OS to the drivers to the port itself

Edwin

 

[Ishayu]

You're mistaken the Nvidia drivers on OS X are (and always have been) written by Nvidia, the same for AMD and their OS X drivers. The OpenGL framework and driver interface layer is written by Apple.

Why, really? When did this change? Or was I always misinformed?

I always installed the CUDA drivers for this reason. I seem to be getting better performance and more features that way.

NVIDIA is notorious for having a "cross-platform" driver, i.e. almost all OS's with NVIDIA have the same features, which is really cool. They've even got FreeBSD drivers! However, the OS X driver does not behave consistently with the others in my experience.

The CUDA drivers are basically the same as the ones shipped with OS but have CUDA specific features enabled (if you look at the frameworks and driver binaries you can see that this is the case). They also have the latest hot fixes which are often missing from the drivers released as part of the OS.

This means CUDA drivers often have better improvements as any fixes planned for the next OS update appear in the CUDA drivers first.

Hmmm... well that might explain it.

Linux XCOM is coming soon

Nyyyyce.

By the way, do AMD have these kinds of "pre-release drivers"? I haven't been able to find them for a while now.

----------

Those drivers are the base NVIDIA ones inside OSX I used.

You seem rather bitter about Unigine for some reason, there's a reason it's a standardised test.

Also Windows shipping with stripped OpenGL is incorrect, since the performance depends on NVIDIA or AMD's drivers that supply the new version. The only time the Windows OpenGL drivers are used is if you haven't installed your GPU's drivers from NV, AMD, or Intel. Generic Windows drivers are bad. NVIDIA has conformed with Khronos 4.4 shortly after it was established.

Believe it or not, I actually rather like Unigine from a technical standpoint. It just doesn't have a lot of games running on it, so its performance doesn't matter to a gamer.

Objectivity is important, and we need to see a system's gaming viability from the PoV of a gamer.

What you said in the last paragraph is incorrect. The drivers that ship with Windows come with an OpenGL 1.2 Core Profile; that's it. Like you go on to point immediately thereafter, you need to download drivers from the developers' website to get the latest OpenGL features.

Oh? Apple caused those devs to stay on 2/2.1 in Linux and Windows? How interesting. Do you have links?

Google OpenGL 3.0 Mac 10.6.

OpenGL 3.0 came to Mac OS X in 10.6.3. This version came out in March 2010.

Laughed at so much it has more games than all the next gen consoles combined, and support for Epic, Unity, Crytek, CDProjeckt Red, and many top graphics engine developers, and games developers.

When Wolfenstein arrives on Mac I'll gladly compare the Windows and OSX performance for OpenGL.

I find it interesting that ONLY with OSX gaming do people Always blame Apple for everything.
Yet on Windows, Microsoft never get anything thrown their way. You don't see them being blamed for Watch Dogs Or Wolfenstein, yet if a game runs badly on OSX it's Apple.
Never the developer. It's a shame there's such a duality.

Sure DX11 has more features than OpenGL4.0/1 but not 100% of them are Ever used. I the majority of games aren't 100% DX11 only, there's always a mishmash of DX9-11 in there for computability.

I completely agree about the next generation consoles. They're pathetic. I've already said I'd prefer a Mac to those piles of trash any day of the week.

Your defense about Apple appears to be somewhat fair. I was under the impression that Apple wrote the OpenGL drivers and defined the features that ship with OS X - in which case poor drivers obviously would be Apple's fault.

When a game runs poorly it's usually an interplay between poor drivers and poor programming. Sometimes it's predominantly or even purely one or the other, but in most cases it's both.

 

[edddeduck]

However, the OS X driver does not behave consistently with the others in my experience.

Drivers are only as good as the frameworks supporting them in the OS, if the frameworks don't support a feature or have an implementation issue then this can directly effect the performance of the drivers on a platform.

It's a complicated relationship where all the parts combine to give the user an experience in a game, any problem could be caused by any part of the chain having an issue, sometimes you need to alter a different part of the chain to regain the performance.

It's rarely as simple as this feature runs slow make it faster The longer I spend in games development the more complex the interactions between all the various systems become!

Edwin

 

[Ishayu]

Drivers are only as good as the frameworks supporting them in the OS, if the frameworks don't support a feature or have an implementation issue then this can directly effect the performance of the drivers on a platform.

It's a complicated relationship where all the parts combine to give the user an experience in a game, any problem could be caused by any part of the chain having an issue, sometimes you need to alter a different part of the chain to regain the performance.

It's rarely as simple as this feature runs slow make it faster The longer I spend in games development the more complex the interactions between all the various systems become!

Edwin

Aye. That I agree with. Although if, as I assumed, Apple provides both the driver and the framework, there's not much else to say than "Make it faster, dammit!"

So what you're saying is, on OS X there's often a mismatch between the framework and the underlying driver?

Believe it or not, none of us at DTU Compute had realized this. Then again, most of them program on Linux or Windows, but even so... that's kind of shameful for us, so thanks for pointing it out.

 

[Cooee!]

I want Apple to highlight gaming on Mac like to do on iOS. Metal for iOS 8 was great. I want to see features like that added to OS X as well.

Do you think Swift will make it easier to make/port games to the Mac?

 

[Ishayu]

I want Apple to highlight gaming on Mac like to do on iOS. Metal for iOS 8 was great. I want to see features like that added to OS X as well.

Do you think Swift will make it easier to make/port games to the Mac?

Almost certainly not. Porting the game to mac and Swift would be... a task equivalent to rewriting the entire game basically. xD

Swift is a very nice language as far as I can tell though. I do like it so far. Still playing with it.

 

[edddeduck]

Do you think Swift will make it easier to make/port games to the Mac?

Not really. Swift is a high level language but is not as good for performance like lower level C++. Things like automated memory management is great for some apps. When you need every last inch of performance you want more control of the lower level actions than Swift allows or is designed for.

All game engines are usually in C++ (and you don't want to rewrite EVERYTHING) so I doubt Swift will be used at all in AAA ports apart from perhaps a few front end panels and quit dialog boxes.

 

[edddeduck]

So what you're saying is, on OS X there's often a mismatch between the framework and the underlying driver?

This is a very high level and simple overview of how I understand it works.

Game -> Framework <-> Driver

So for example if the driver could potentially support a new call but the framework does not have the implementation stubs then the feature cannot be exposed to the game to use. You also get things like internal driver representation and how these interact with the frameworks internal representation and loads of complex stuff.

Overall performance of the chain depends on the game, the frameworks and at the final layer the drivers. You need to make sure the code is optimised at all stages. Now the game can choose different paths though the other layers depending on how you implement but the key thing is it is not Game -> Drivers there is a middle layer that the OS controls.

Edwin

 

[Ishayu]

This is a very high level and simple overview of how I understand it works.

Game -> Framework <-> Driver

So for example if the driver could potentially support a new call but the framework does not have the implementation stubs then the feature cannot be exposed to the game to use. You also get things like internal driver representation and how these interact with the frameworks internal representation and loads of complex stuff.

Overall performance of the chain depends on the game, the frameworks and at the final layer the drivers. You need to make sure the code is optimised at all stages. Now the game can choose different paths though the other layers depending on how you implement but the key thing is it is not Game -> Drivers there is a middle layer that the OS controls.

Edwin

From what I understood the OS simply contains the headers which define which function you can call, and the drivers contain the actual implementation corresponding to these headers.

I thought there was nothing more to it than that. There isn't on Linux or Windows.

But alright. I haven't done much OpenGL work on OS X myself - but perhaps I should get started. I gave up relatively early after discovering bug after bug after bug, but this was in Snow Leopard.