Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
OS X Metal for OS X?
- Thread starter Surfheart
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Jean,
In all in the reading I've been doing since Metal was announced, I'm going to have to go dig that up.
ETA: I believe that was due to existing developmental delays in OGL when waiting for Apple to implement new versions of OGL to OS X. It's a delay of about 2 years or so. Now, maybe that won't apply to Vulkan.
In the meantime, this is an interesting bit from iMore:
http://www.imore.com/metal-os-x-so-huge-i-no-longer-need-mac-pro
Last edited:
How is Mac Hardware weak for gaming? It is THE SAME hardware that PC's use. Same Intel processor, same mobile GFX card, same RAM.
Granted, it is not as good as a gaming laptop, but those things have like 45 minute battery life (not hyperbole, I had a VERY nice Toshiba just before I bailed on Windows, and 45 minutes was about all the 18" Qosimo could manage). Wrong tool for the wrong job if you are expecting to run latest high end games at 4K with every feature maxed out. That's like complaining that your Corvette has crappy towing capacity.
MBPro does decent with same year games with reasonable graphics settings. Look at the power draw for high end dual card solutions. Look at the thermal budget. You'd have so many fans in your laptop it could double as a drone.
Granted, it is not as good as a gaming laptop, but those things have like 45 minute battery life (not hyperbole, I had a VERY nice Toshiba just before I bailed on Windows, and 45 minutes was about all the 18" Qosimo could manage). Wrong tool for the wrong job if you are expecting to run latest high end games at 4K with every feature maxed out. That's like complaining that your Corvette has crappy towing capacity.
MBPro does decent with same year games with reasonable graphics settings. Look at the power draw for high end dual card solutions. Look at the thermal budget. You'd have so many fans in your laptop it could double as a drone.
"Only the devs that make Apps for iOS"?!?!?!?
Aren't nearly all developers looking at iOS development? If not for their day job with a big corporation, then at least as a hobby/lottery ticket to make the next Flappy Bird. I mean seriously if you are programing today, aren't you thinking a lot about programming for iOS? What else is going on in your field? Isn't this so obviously "where the puck is going"? If you are a programmer I think you have to be thinking about iOS. iOS is heading toward eclipsing Windows as the OS that wealthy fraction of humanity spends most of their free time with. Don't you want to program for the OS that humans are using by choice? I mean if potential customers are using an OS by choice in their free time and spending their own money on Apps for that OS, isn't that the OS that you are going to focus on?
I know the gaming community is still dominated by folks using Windows and consoles. But isn't Apple entering the console market through an updated Apple TV console just obvious and expected at this point? Do you think that large software companies aren't aware of this? Do you think they just want their company to survive another three years? I would think they want to be around for the long haul and that iOS and Mac OS seems like a very obvious trend these days, and has been for at least the last several years.
Well, that's what we all wish for. Of course iOS has a greatly established development base. Apple worked hard to make what iOS development community is today (e.g. to attract devs). But - currently - I'm not so sure how the big s/w houses will see this steering to Metal. They were constantly ignoring Mac for years now (extremely late releases, badly made ports, and...wrappers...I really hate that last one). We'll have to see if Metal will work in a positive way (e.g. it will be adopted) or not. Right now, I wouldn't even try to guess.
If he had said that Mac hardware isn't good for keeping a machine upgraded for the latest demanding games, I could 100% get behind that statement, because it's true. Apple restricts owner-performed GPU upgrading for all its computers. You can't buy an off-the-shelf GPU card and pop it into any currently-sold Mac. Macs can, and often do, ship with cutting-edge GPUs, but within two years (becoming less because of the increasing pace of development cycles), they get lapped because of newer GPUs available.
So, the owner of a Windows desktop PC can, with some care and attention paid, choose a machine that can be upgraded to keep up with next-generation games over 2 or 3 iterations, without having to dole out the money for a whole new system every time they want the latest and greatest.
THAT is the real advantage that Apple has ceded to its desktop PC competitors. But that ship sailed nearly 20 years ago. For the determined and skilled, there are work arounds to give your Mac upgradable graphics. I'm thinking primarily of e-GPU solutions and going the Hackintosh route.
I think the shops that program directly for Mac will all adopt Metal pretty quickly because of the performance improvements. I think some additional shops are going to start writing for Mac, but not many.
The real area of interest is writing for iOS anyway. I'm still convinced that by the end of the year we will be playing games on our living room TVs through an Apple TV running a souped up A9 processor with extra RAM. And those games will run on Metal, Since the number of Apple TVs will quickly catch up with consols, the big shops will take notice. Not to mention their games will port nearly effortlessly from iPhone to Apple TV due to similar to nearly shared OS.
Has anyone else been watching the Metal videos from WWDC 2015? The one I'm into now is the "What's New in Metal, Part 1", led by Rav Dhiraj, GPU Software at Apple. It's a 36 minute talk, and the first of two Metal deep dives they're doing.
To get to it, download the WWDC app from the iOS App Store. Look at the schedule for the week and filter it by game content. It's Session 603.
You can watch it straight from Apple's site here:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=603
Thoughts?
To get to it, download the WWDC app from the iOS App Store. Look at the schedule for the week and filter it by game content. It's Session 603.
You can watch it straight from Apple's site here:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=603
Thoughts?
Last edited:
This may be of interest, as Dhiraj just made the point that Metal will only be usable on all Macs since 2012.
Apparently, Unity Engine 5 will have this Viking Village demo available when it's ready.
Also, Part 2 of "What's New in Metal" will be held 9am PST Thursday (today, for you pilgrim), while "Metal Performance Optimization Techniques" will be held Friday at 11am PST.
Apparently, Apple has a Game Technologies Evangelist - Allan Schaffer - sort of a go-to guy for devs to send their Metal questions to.
Last edited:
You completely have no Idea what you are trying to judge. No offence, thats just an observation.
I have 2012 year computer and completely have no problems with running games from present year on it. Why would I have them? And yes, it is a laptop. Mid 2012 MBP. And it was 1800$ machine.
I am just reporting my observations on what happen with me, and reflecting other people's impressions of the macbook hardware I read, discussed, and watched on videos.
Yes I can. It means that its not powerful enough to run modern games released on same year unless its on low resolution. Weak as in a cheaper priced PC can have higher specs. Compare the Alienware 15 at $1500 with the Macbook Pro 13 at $1800.
I am specifically talking about laptops
I'm not. I'm talking about the entire Mac line. And neither are you, really. You're equating money spent on each option with performance. Since different Apple Macs have different configs for GPUs (some of which are better suited for gaming than others within the Mac line), you can't pick a random MBP and compare it to a PC laptop that's designed with gaming in mind.
Further, you can't extrapolate that out and make generalized judgments about Mac hardware being weak for games. It doesn't apply and it's not factual. The most that can be safely concluded from your example is that one given config of MBP doesn't perform as well as one given config of Alienware laptop.
What you should have said is that Macs aren't good for keeping up-to-date with the latest demanding titles, because the GPUs in modern Macs aren't user-replaceable with off-the-shelf GPUs.
That is a factual statement.
Last edited:
Mine is on Yosemite.On El Capitan?
Thanks for that benchmark, great thing to campare
No Mac ever was build with gaming in mind, so it's no big surprise that a dedicated gaming PC offers better value for money than e.g. a iMac. If gaming is your only concern, simply don't get a Mac, easy as that.
Btw, there's no such thing as a gaming laptop. It's overpriced ******** which will be old and worthless when the next big AAA game comes out.
Btw, there's no such thing as a gaming laptop. It's overpriced ******** which will be old and worthless when the next big AAA game comes out.
Bah.. there are laptops built for gaming, that have MXM gpu cards. Meaning, you can upgrade them with newer MXM cards.
MSI comes to mind right off the bat... http://us.msi.com/product/nb/GT80-Titan-SLI-GTX-980M-SLI/#hero-specification&sku_no=440
You're welcome.
For the past two years, I've done annual game benchmarking to see what differences have worked their way into OS X and the games we play.
I'll do the same this year, when El Cap comes out.
Color me cautiously optimistic.
Which is an in-house engine developed by CDProject Red, the company that made The Witcher (hint, its in the name). A company using their own engine for many of their own games is quite standard, but it is not available for sale or licensing to others.
Additionally, RedEngine3 is not available for OS X. Only RedEngine 1 and 2 are. That may change in the future.
In-house engines of this sort tend to have limited platform availability compared to the more commercial engines. 2 consoles, along with Windows tends to be as far as these engines go.
I have, and the list of 1st party engine games worth a damn vs 3rd party engine games worth a damn is significantly larger.
What's our resident Aspyr rep got to say about future plans? Personally I'm more excited to see if existing ports (Civ V, BE, XCOM) will be updated.
But the witcher 3 for OS X is around the corner. Its engine should already be ported to Mac. Unless the Mac version will be implementing a different engine, but that would be very weird.
Plenty of Laptops comparable to MBPros do not allow the GFX card to be swapped. Sure, the gaming laptops do, but that is kind of their market.
Oh please.
Do you know why they call it the "Unreal Engine?" See, there used to be this game called "Unreal Tournament" that was really popular. The graphics were so nice that the maker figured out they could license it and turn it into a completely new revenue stream without spending any extra money. Crytek came out of FarCry. Just extrapolate from there.
"Hey, look Phil! All that work we did to make the game anyway? People will pay us to use it. Its like free money!" Perhaps you haven't followed corporate trends lately, but they LOVE free money. They are ALL looking for free money.
Every first party engine out there is looking to become a 3rd party engine as fast as they can. If they are NOT becoming one, there is something wrong with it compared to the third party engines. It may not be something you care about, but something is wrong (documentation, price, difficulty, supported platforms - SOMETHING). IF you drove a dump truck full of money up to any one of them, they would license it in a heartbeat. IF they say otherwise, they are flat out lying unless there is something so terribly wrong with it they risk cannibalizing current sales by exposing the flaw. Even then, it would have to be REALLY bad.
So, a first party engine is just a third party engine that hasn't been licensed (yet). The whole point of MAKING an engine is to reuse it over and over to reduce development costs.