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Metal system requirements
- Thread starter VMukhtarov
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No I didn't. I gave you two scenarios. Either will happen. Apple wont continue supporting both with two drivers forever. This happened before with PowerPC --> Intel. We are here again. THIS IS AS BIG THING!
Emulator on top of Metal sounds logical. But so did Vulkan instead of Metal. So with business logic Apple will drop openGL in few years and / or build an emulator on top of Metal.
Both are made using programming and scripting languages that follow a set of rules and both can be simple or extremely complex. There are websites that are really deep and complex that require many months of development and hundreds of thousands lines of code.
So my comparation is still valid. There is no technical reason for Apple to not scale the usage of metal in older computers. We have been doing it since there are computers and software. This is even more true if we take into account that, if apple supports from, let's say, 2010 we are talking of 15-20 different gpus, so not that big of a task.
Just run my little util from post http://netkas.org/?p=1405
just double click on metalInfo and you will know if you have metal support, no need to guess.
Metal supported cards list seems to be same as directx12 supported cards list, with one exception: ivy bridge iGPU supports metal.
just double click on metalInfo and you will know if you have metal support, no need to guess.
Metal supported cards list seems to be same as directx12 supported cards list, with one exception: ivy bridge iGPU supports metal.
There is mentioned on the video also GPU Families, which means different GPU generations. Developer can choose what generation of GPUs his going to support and that opens a set of different features. For instance, for iOS they have now two families, A7 and A8 chips. And for both they offer different versions too.
For OS X, there's just one family at the moment. Devices 2012-2015. No promises for support for Macs before 2012.
Where did you find out that OS X 10.11 UI is using Metal? Obviously that's a good thing but I thought that Metal was only focused for applications as of now.
Oh cool thanks! Literally just read that somewhere else. Looks like my MacBook won't need an upgrade now since I'm planning to go from Mavericks -> El Capitan.
Update: Btw I didn't know that the OS X Yosemite's UI was CPU bound. Was that what was causing the 'lags'?
2012 includes Macs with radeon HD6000 series. So if those don't have Metal drivers yet, they should be supported later.
Speaking of which, it may be interesting to run Xbench's Quartz (core graphics) test on 10.11
It does make sense and I don't think it has to do with feature levels like DX11 or OpenGL 4 support. As has been mentioned the AMD HD5000 and HD6000 are architecturally distinct from all other supported GPUs in that they use a VLIW architecture which restricted how the underlying ALUs could be used. Different GPUs can offer the same features, but process them internally in different ways. A high-level API like DX11 or OpenGL abstracts away those differences, but the whole point of a low-level API is to directly expose the hardware which likely makes supporting the AMD HD5000 and HD6000 infeasible if they operate completely differently. This is likely the reason why DX12 and Vulkan also don't support the AMD HD5000/HD6000.
The Mid 2012 Mac Pro is the odd one out likely because Apple doesn't count it as a new 2012 model since it shares the same hardware and model identifier of the Mid 2010 Mac Pro.
What new Mac model introduced in 2012 other than the questionably new Mac Pro has a Radeon HD6000? I think all new 2012 models used either Ivy Bridge or Kepler.
Even if someone wrote OpenGL 4.5 on top of Metal since it isn't part of the native system wouldn't games need to be programmed specifically call for it instead of the existing OpenGL 4.1? And it's highly unlikely developers will program for a 3rd party OpenGL solution that may or may not be there.
What about cards that require the Nvidia Web Driver? (especially for hackintoshes.) Nvidia will have to update their driver to support Metal, right?
You're right. The radeonHD 6000 Macs were from 2011. So no Metal for those it seems.
It's interesting to note that tessellation is not listed as a feature addition in Metal for Mac vs Metal for iOS. Since the existing OpenGL 4.1 already supports tessellation, this is one area where Metal is actually behind OpenGL. Metal does bring integrated compute shaders which is arguably more important for new games so I suppose if a trade has to be made for now, this is the right one.
I suspect though that support for tessellation in Metal may actually be planned for this year. They are probably just waiting for PowerVR Series7 GPUs to ship in the A9 and iPhone 6s in September to reveal tessellation in Metal for iOS and since Metal for Mac is a superset of Metal for iOS, tessellation will then be available when El Capitan launches in October.
I'd say that at this stage I couldn't see them adding tessellation in time for the RTW (Release To Web) given that they've already announced the Metal framework for both so I wouldn't be surprised if the push it off until the next release or maybe maybe in iOS 9.1/9.2 along with an OS X 10.11 update at the earliest. OpenGL will hang around for quite some time but it was interesting the fact that Adobe was invited up on stage to show off their own software taking advantage of Metal so it appears that Apple was hoping that the OpenGL NG would be a game changer for gaming and the traditional OpenGL users but found that what came out, Vulkan, is very much geared towards game developers. Metal on the other hand seems to be geared towards a wider set and it is interesting how in the 'Platform State of the Union' they mention OpenGL/OpenCL when mentioning Metal. I wonder whether the introduction of Metal necessitated a change in the graphics infrastructure because all the feedback so far have been people praising the improvement in responsiveness even on computers prior to 2012 which aren't Metal capable so something else must also be at play under the hood.
I am also wondering about that. I guess they might expect one to do tessellation via compute shaders + draw indirect
How do you reach this conclusion? I can't see any significant difference in aim between Metal and Vulkan. Both are aimed for efficient access to GPU compute and graphical functions. They even share same key concepts. The main difference I can see is that Metal seems more programmer-friendly.
BTW, this is quite a nice writeup I have found on the net: http://hacksoflife.blogspot.ch/2015/06/os-x-metal-raw-notes.html
They might be focusing on ensuring that Metal is as clean as possible with higher level stuff like tessellation is provided by Metal Kit by doing what you described.
I reached that conclusion on the basis that the primary companies who have been publicly talking about it have been nVidia, AMD and games companies with little or nothing said by the big names like Adobe, Quark, AutoCad, Avid and others which have been using OpenGL for years.
Yeah, but thats more of a political thing than anything else. There is nothing about Vulkan that makes it more suitable to games than to professional applications. On the conceptual level, Vulkan and Metal are extremely similar. Its just that the need to have next-gen graphical APIs is most obvious in the gaming industry.
On the bright side, the 6970 is pretty powerful. Metal is only really necessary for integrated GPUs, so notebooks will benefit the most from it.I am kinda disappointed.
My iMac Mid 2011 has radeon 6970 and will not get full Metal Support.
I am fairly sure that dGPUs will see higher performance benefits from Metal than iGPUs.
Yes please! If anyone is able to do a Quartz Graphics and User Interface test comparison with Yosemite/Mavericks that would be great.