OS X Metal for OS X?

[edddeduck]

My computer has Geforce 9400M . Not sure if this is integrated or worse than the 8600M. Its the late 2008 unibody model

It's an integrated card, the dedicated card was the 9600M which was one of the longest supported gaming cards on the Mac it's only just dropped off the supported list in the last year to 18 months which is impressive.

The 9400M however was under clocked and had a maximum of 256MB of shared VRAM. It did support some games but the drivers were never great on that card and more to the point it just didn't have that much power as it wasn't designed for 3D.

Basically if you want long battery and don't care too much about gaming then integrated is a great solution as you can game a little but usually on lower settings. If you want to play games (in OS X, Steam OS or Windows) on Mac hardware then dedicated graphics cards are the way to go.

Even then you should research the card options and experiences some cards and models perform better than others so it's always good to wait and see how well the cards and drivers perform before jumping.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

my point is that Apple hardware is expensive yet extremely under-delivers. While I underdtand its not built for gaming, but it should at least run contemporary games. As I mentioned earlier, my 2008 macbook was going crazy running a same year game release with fans working to the maximum and CPU heat reaching 85-92C and that was on low settings IIRC .

this shouldn't be the case for a $1500 brand new machine.

My point was there are options available in the Mac line of computers that are quite capable of gaming and it's up to you if you prefer that or something else but there isn't any need to bash Macs and OS X gaming basically.

On the largest screen iMacs you can get the best mobile GPUs on the market at any given time as new iMacs release. They are quite capable of gaming.

I scrolled up and found you mentioned Left 4 Dead as well as what GPU you report having. Then I checked the OS X requirements on Steam for the game and found you do not meet them. The minimum integrated card to run the game is the Intel HD 3000.

 

[soulsyphon]

imacs might have a recent mobile video card, but some of us are looking for laptops... i'm not going to bash imacs for their size but i really don't want a 27 or 21 inch screen, i think 17 inch is enough for my eyes. maybe it's because i sit so close to my screen...

not only that but games under perform on osx compared to windows... if you bootcamp you'll see you get more fps in most games.

the current "best" mac laptop is using a 750m card, which is horrible compared to 970m on a 1499$ asus rog laptop.

when apple updates its most powerful laptop, it'll probably have 945m or 950m... no gamer wants that. yuck.

 

[edddeduck]

the current "best" mac laptop is using a 750m card, which is horrible compared to 970m on a 1499$ asus rog laptop.

when apple updates its most powerful laptop, it'll probably have 945m or 950m... no gamer wants that. yuck.

I know, but based on experience of carrying around a PC gaming laptop recently for Linux dev work I can tell you my 15" retina feels like it is 3 times smaller and lighter and a more solid built quality.

However for raw gaming performance on the graphics card the gaming laptop is much more powerful.

Choose your hardware and software solutions based on what you need and what is important to you. If a MBA is perfect and you only game a little then great. If you play the latest games on launch day at Ultra settings but want to travel then perhaps a Windows gaming laptop is best. If you want light weight portability, OS X and high quality gaming then a rMBP is likely the best solution.

Just do what's best for you and understand what's best for you isn't best for others. That's what free will is all about

 

[leman]

If the Vulkan spec is released by late summer, I fully expect Apple to deliver a Vulkan implementation in 10.11. Vulkan is the ideal graphics API for Apple: the driver is inherently much stabler and much more simple to implement compared to OpenGL. Furthermore, the way that Apple has been implementing OpenGL on OS X is very close to Vulkan's basic design.

The primary reason why OS X underperforms in graphics compared to Windows is that companies like Nvidia/AMD are putting insane man-hours into optimising the hell out of their drivers for specific usage and game titles. In comparison, only a fraction of time is spend on OS X drivers. Which is understandable. Better gaming performance on OS X does not really help the IHV with hardware sales. Vulkan will change all that. By offering predictable performance and reducing driver overhead to the minimum, Vulkan implementations should be fairly comparable across the platforms. Windows will still be faster, because the drivers will continue to do custom shader-rewriting for game titles, but the difference should be much smaller.

Not only. There is a possibility, that Mantle/Vulkan gives the application ability to see two seperate GPUs in one computer as a one big GPU.

There is absolutely no such possibility. Vulkan is a thin abstraction. It will allow you to enumerate all the GPUs in the computer and use them in parallel. However, you as a programmer are responsible for everything. Want something like SLI? Implement it yourself. What you suggest is agains the very nature of the Vulkan API. In fact, it it were to offer something like that, it would be a total and utter failure as a graphical API.

 

[koyoot]

There is absolutely no such possibility. Vulkan is a thin abstraction. It will allow you to enumerate all the GPUs in the computer and use them in parallel. However, you as a programmer are responsible for everything. Want something like SLI? Implement it yourself. What you suggest is agains the very nature of the Vulkan API. In fact, it it were to offer something like that, it would be a total and utter failure as a graphical API.

You've said exactly what I was referring to, only you explained it in plain english, I didn't .

 

[MacBH928]

Currently the only laptop that has a GPU is the high-end macbook pro at $2500. Even then its the GT 750M which is lacking compared to other laptops in the market.

I am not hating on the mac, I will never use Windows, its just that mac is not for gaming.

You can get decent performance but you will have to pay a lot compared to more powerful PC hardware that can be obtained for cheaper.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

imacs might have a recent mobile video card, but some of us are looking for laptops... i'm not going to bash imacs for their size but i really don't want a 27 or 21 inch screen, i think 17 inch is enough for my eyes. maybe it's because i sit so close to my screen...

not only that but games under perform on osx compared to windows... if you bootcamp you'll see you get more fps in most games.

the current "best" mac laptop is using a 750m card, which is horrible compared to 970m on a 1499$ asus rog laptop.

when apple updates its most powerful laptop, it'll probably have 945m or 950m... no gamer wants that. yuck.

As I said, if you want to play games it is up to you to choose the appropriate hardware for your purpose and that means hardware as well as operating system that you personally will be happy with. On the other hand, I see no need or benefit gained from raining on anybody else's parade. I love my iMac, OS X, the apps, the ecosystem, the excellent support when I needed it and it plays games great in OS X or Windows if I want. This computer is most certainly capable of playing games well. I never owned better than midrange on the PC side anyway. Comparatively speaking, this is far nicer than anything I ever owned and used in the past.

If I needed a laptop and wanted to game on it, I'd go with the best MacPro option and good enough. I wouldn't be willing to use a non-Apple machine personally. In my own case though, fortunately portability is not important and an iMac 27" was the obvious choice for my needs. I don't feel I paid too much for it because I do not measure its value purely in terms of gaming. I use it for a lot of things. Gaming is important to me and this does it well but it is just one thing I enjoy doing with my iMac. If the one and only thing I did with a desktop computer was play games, I'd own a windows box perhaps but that isn't how it is for me.

Actually, no I wouldn't run windows. I'd run linux.

 

[AndreGB]

Not only. There is a possibility, that Mantle/Vulkan gives the application ability to see two seperate GPUs in one computer as a one big GPU.

It is very important for configs like AMD APU+dGPU, Intel Integrated + AMD dGPU or...

Dual GPUs from Mac Pro.

That is phenomenal.

That is very true! I can't wait to see if that future is truly the way they've been painting.

Part of that "Apple's hardware under delivers" someone mentioned earlier is due to some poor drivers from Apple, we can't deny that. I am pretty sure Edwin, who posted on this topic, has already experienced some frustration with Apple's OpenGL drivers as well. And that's what Vulkan is supposed to eliminate in the near future. I'm very hopeful.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

Do I need to be worried about all my OS X OpenGL games becoming obsolete in the not so distant future? I hope not. I don't want to jump off a bridge and die.

 

[tomvos]

Do I need to be worried about all my OS X OpenGL games becoming obsolete in the not so distant future? I hope not. I don't want to jump off a bridge and die.

I don't think so. OpenGL is used in many products— not merely in games. E.g. the whole GUI of Mac OS X is based on Quartz Compositor which uses a component called Quartz Extreme which actually uses OpenGL under the hood.

And then there are lots of professional applications which use OpenGL. Think of all the 3D design applications, many 2D paint programs, etc. There are many reasons to keep support for OpenGL for quite a long time in the future.
However, I would not be surprised, if OpenGL 4.1 is the highest feature level we'll ever see on the Mac (currently OpenGL 4.5 is the highest specified level). Perhaps Apple announces Vulkan as the their intended method to access upcoming modern features of the GPUs.

This would allow them to unify the programming frameworks for 3D graphics on the Mac OS X and iOS platforms. I think this would be a better choice than sticking to Metal on iOS and Vulkan on Mac OS X.

 

[antonis]

(...) I never owned better than midrange on the PC side anyway. (...)

And most PC users do not, as well.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

I don't think so. OpenGL is used in many products—not merely in games. E.g. the whole GUI of Mac OS X is based on Quartz Compositor which uses a component called Quartz Extreme which actually uses OpenGL under the hood.

And then there are lots of professional applications which use OpenGL. Think of all the 3D design applications, many 2D paint programs, etc. There are many reasons to keep support for OpenGL for quite a long time in the future.
However, I would not be surprised, if OpenGL 4.1 is the highest feature level we'll ever see on the Mac (currently OpenGL 4.5 is the highest specified level). Perhaps Apple announces Vulkan as the their intended method to access upcoming modern features of the GPUs.

This would allow them to unify the programming frameworks for 3D graphics on the Mac OS X and iOS platforms. I think this would be a better choice than sticking to Metal on iOS and Vulkan on Mac OS X.

Thank you. That's good to hear.

I love that little NSA notification by the way. lol

----------

And most PC users do not, as well.

Yeah, I do not doubt that for a moment.

 

[leman]

Do I need to be worried about all my OS X OpenGL games becoming obsolete in the not so distant future? I hope not. I don't want to jump off a bridge and die.

I am fairly sure that there will be open-source OpenGL emulators in the near future that work on top of Vulkan. I think the best course of action for Apple is to only have the Vulkan driver + such an OpenGL layer. The performance of such an emulator could be slightly worse than that of a native OpenGL driver, but that doesn't matter much as we are talking about future hardware.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

I am fairly sure that there will be open-source OpenGL emulators in the near future that work on top of Vulkan. I think the best course of action for Apple is to only have the Vulkan driver + such an OpenGL layer. The performance of such an emulator could be slightly worse than that of a native OpenGL driver, but that doesn't matter much as we are talking about future hardware.

Any thoughts on what this might mean for Wine/Wineskin and Boxer?

 

[leman]

Any thoughts on what this might mean for Wine/Wineskin and Boxer?

I guess Wine developers could invest in developing a DirectX-to-Vulkan layer, which should give the games under Wine a healthy boost.

 

[vkd]

You are the first person on cyberspace to believe Apple computers are equally good for gaming

On a bubble-bursting mission I hereby declare your statement completely erroneous, false and subject to the highest proliferation of speculative imagination driven by egoism. In short, you are incorrect.

 

[iosxuser]

besides blizzard/valve... osx gaming blows, but thats ok since i only play blizzard games.

non blizz games have a certain feeling to them like lack of polish or gameplay is weird in a sense that theres invisible walls or cant jump above stuff or animation is screwed up or lots of bugs etc

 

[Dirtyharry50]

besides blizzard/valve... osx gaming blows, but thats ok since i only play blizzard games.

non blizz games have a certain feeling to them like lack of polish or gameplay is weird in a sense that theres invisible walls or cant jump above stuff or animation is screwed up or lots of bugs etc

All I can say is, you must not leave Battle.net much.

Have you ever played any of the excellent ports done by Feral or Aspyr for example? I have to think the answer is no because they do not meet your description even a little bit, like not at all. I can think of more examples but the excellent work of those two companies illustrate my point perfectly.

 

[iosxuser]

i'm not interested at all in aspyr/feral games... not because of the companies porting them... just the game themselves... then again i think the entire steam library is dull... of course this might sound like fanboyism but non blizz games just suck imo

theres cs go and team fortress that are good but cs go is redundant and team fortress doesn't have a class i want to play. the blizz overwatch game however... has many classes that seem fun to play.

i don't preach on blizzard, i don't flame people who hate the company... like they are money hungry, their graphics are cartoony, their gameplay is simplistic/casual and their balance issues last for years.

i understand all that, but blizz works for me like ios/iphone works for me... i don't like android, i don't like windows... its a preference, i know i'm not the only blizz gamer out there.

ps: i've been gaming since age 4... first nintendo console, i've had this blizz mentally since starcraft was released, i'm now 30+ and i just can't seem to like other games... i've tried hundreds, the latest i tried was ESO and i want a refund...

 

[Ferazel]

I've been thinking about this a lot over the past year. If Apple announces nothing at WWDC this year Apple is going to be in trouble for OS X. Apple needs to announce one of three things at WWDC or OS X is going to be severely behind the curve on having a decent 3D API. Vulkan support (best option IMO), metal OS X implementation, or at the very least kick the can by adopting OpenGL 4.5 support.

The first, and in my opinion best option is for Apple to be an early adopter the new Vulkan API. Others are 100% correct that OpenGL is used for many professional apps and OS X itself. Keeping the API in the OS is going to be important for backwards compatibility and portability. Updating some of OSX's high-end APIs (Quartz, Core Animation) to Vulkan could really be a lot more performant. Vulkan seems to be a complete cross-platform Metal replacement. With gpu compute, shader compilation, and a low-overhead graphics API Vulkan would be a pretty close feature comparison to Metal. The problem with Vulkan is that it is very late to be ready for OS 10.11. They just announced a preliminary spec at GDC in March, and Apple has been very slow to adopt the new OpenGL standards. Sure some of the heaviest backers have some alpha version drivers, but the group is full of a lot of different views and it takes them time to come to any cohesive decision. I'm pretty sure Apple sees this as a liability as Apple doesn't like to be held back by companies not in their control. They may view the lagging OpenGL group as a means to cut them out of the equation.

In the meantime there is Metal and the possible porting of this API to OS X. However, there are problems porting Metal to OS X. For example the current API is very iOS focused. The API assumes a unified memory architecture (same ram for both CPU and GPU). Metal also doesn't support some important DirectX 11 features like tessellation. A problem with Metal is that while it is a decent API, I have worries about Apple being able to dedicate the resource keep pace in the rapidly developing 3D graphics industry. Leaving features that are available on other platforms out of the API makes it problematic to port or keep feature parity with on OS X versions of the software. Let's be honest, OS X does not have the marketshare that iOS does on the smartphone market, I don't know how much pushing of new APIs they can really do on the PC devs.

Then there is the lame approach of just updating to OpenGL 4.5 or keeping OS X at 4.1 feature set. This I feel is a disaster due to ignoring the problem for another year. The future is Vulkan and pretty much everyone in the consortium and industry agrees. There are already features that even Linux has, that OS X doesn't. That's right, thanks to the help of companies like Valve, Linux is becoming a better gaming OS than OS X. Apple is a forward thinking company, and they have no doubt thought about what direction they will go. However, if they just stick with OpenGL proper for a year I am going to be very disappointed.

Anyways, I REALLY hope that Apple announces their future 3D API with 10.11 at WWDC. Only a couple months away! Here's hoping Apple being a tier 1 supporter of Vulkan or a new OS X metal that has feature parity with D11 or D12.

 

[Exhale]

In the meantime there is Metal and the possible porting of this API to OS X. However, there are problems porting Metal to OS X. For example the current API is very iOS focused.

The bigger issue with Metal is that much like OpenGL ES, its feature set is actually incredibly limited. Its (currently) not even remotely as capable as D3D or OpenGL proper. Not much of an issue on phones and tablet - but the shortcomings would be very obvious on 'computer' platforms. Shader support especially is primitive, and they're key for high-quality 'computer' games.

 

[jeanlain]

I don't think metal on OS X would help much, since it would add yet another 3D graphics API for PCs. I don't see game engine developers taking the effort to code for metal if they already have some openGL code for Linux/SteamOS.
AMD will drop Mantle in favor of Vulkan, Apple should drop Metal as well.
Since Apple has contributed to Vulkan (they are among the participants), I'm cautiously optimistic that they will support it on OS X.

 

[koyoot]

Metal is like Mantle - low-level API without the high-level features such as Tesselation etc.

Vulkan is something like DirectX 12. And is based on Mantle, with Low-level features at its foudation.

Thats why Metal will not appear on OSX.

 

[leman]

then again i think the entire steam library is dull... of course this might sound like fanboyism but non blizz games just suck imo

Your taste is your own problem but I just want to point out that there are a lot of excellent steam games that run really well on OS X. As recent examples I can bring Cities Skylines and Reassembly (which is probably one of the best executed games I have ever played). The main point is whether the developer ports the game to OS X as an afterthough or if the game is being developed with cross-platform compatibility in mind.