Well, I have a mid-2011 Mac mini with an AMD Radeon HD 6630M, so no Metal for me.
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Metal system requirements
- Thread starter VMukhtarov
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I more meant the fact that OS X releases still "support" them, rather than Apple's official status, which is based upon a "years old" system.
My 2008 MBP's GPU has never failed. I sometimes wonder how many have not failed overall as a percentage. You only hear about the ones that fail, after all. In fact, the ONLY problem I've had with my 2008 MBP in all this time was the left ventilation fan developed a noisy bearing noise. I replaced it with one I bought online and all is well again. I also upgraded the ram to 4GB and the hard drive to a 500GB 7200 RPM model back in 2010 to work on an album with Logic Pro.
I'm thinking of putting an SSD in there next, although the 1.5Gbps limit of the controller is a bit off-putting for that (still access times would be tremendously improved and the overall speed would still almost double even so. It still makes a good portable music studio, after all). I'll be curious to see if El Capitain runs on it and if so, if it's faster than Mavericks (which I can tell is a bit slower in Logic Pro as some of my songs that were borderline for playing in real time are now crossing the line a bit on the CPU count and stopping, indicating to me that it's diverting CPU time to the OS. That almost makes me wish I'd left Snow Leopard on it. I could go back, but I'd have to re-install (the backup drive with newer OS has been updated several times since then and clearly something like XBench wasn't enough to show the impact of the changes).
And yet OSX continues to support "obsolete" hardware. I rather resent the term "obsolete" given it runs Mavericks well, browsers are still "snappy" and Logic Pro keeps right on ticking. CPU speed increases aren't quite what they used to be in the early 2000s. GPU speed increases don't matter terribly much when you're not gaming. It can play HD video. What else do I need it to do on that end? GPU off-loading would have been nice (supported in Windows for that GPU), but other than modern games, I'm not sure what it would do for me. I'll consider a new MBP when Thunderbolt III is standard.
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Mine was great for years, I felt the same way.
My early-08 MBP died in summer of 2014. Was put to sleep, never woke up nor booted again.
Had never shown symptoms of failure beforehand. I myself too had considered myself lucky, up until that point.
I do miss the machine however. SSD made a huge difference for me on mine. Was uber quick.
-CanadaMaple
Well, in the MacPro5.1 you can replace the video card with something newer than what it shipped with in 2010. If you do that I'm pretty sure it will also support Metal.
I have a Mid 2012 MP 5,1 that was manufactured in 2013 with a 5870. I doubt that card is supported, but I upgraded to an HD 7970 that seems to be well supported. I ran the test that netkas posted and metal was alive and kicking.
Directx works on a crapload of different gpus. Same goes for OpenGL. Apple has 3-4 Different gpus in each iteration or year. I'm pretty sure they coul design drivers for each gpu they use.
This is leading up to version 1 of Metal for OS X.
How long has MS been developing DirectX? Since 1994, first introduced as part of Windows 95. About 21 years? It's not reasonable to expect them to be at compatibility parity given that difference.
Just look at the cost of nVidia's settlement fund for these GPUs failures IIRC, it was like $100 million dollars or more. The GPU was practically confirmed as defective all the way through, there are zero doubts about it.
My '08 MBP's GPU died 4 times in a row. I gave up and bought a different laptop as I couldn't tolerate the downtime it caused.
You seem overly defensive about it. I understand you had some serious bad luck (clearly a bad run of chips if nothing else). But to say "zero doubts about it" and "defective all the way through" sounds pretty "god sure" in light of my notebook running strong for 7 years now. I don't think they replaced every single GPU out there and that's my point. I mean it was the glue they used between the chip and the heat sink, not the GPU itself per se. Of course, once I heard about the problem, though I did put MacFanControl on the machine to make sure the fan came on much sooner for gaming, but I did play a lot of games on the thing before I got my 2012 Mac Mini and it hasn't glitched one time ever. So I can only conclude regardless of whether there were any without the defect, I've gotten my money's worth out of the machine. Other than the noisy fan bearing, it's had no other issues and is still running strong (with Mavericks on it right now the same as my Mini).
Well, I'm slightly defensive because of the replacements I had to go through. However, I'm just pointing that that it was a large problem that nVidia was eventually forced to pay for all failures that came in. That isn't a common thing for every GPU. My sister had a Dell laptop with the same series that failed twice as well.
And your Mac Pro 5,1 will continue to be well supported until Apple decides not to support it because it's the last machine they built that you can actually upgrade. But here's the problem I just experienced which may be why Apple is saying 2012 and newer. I just bought a used 5,1. I was still working on my 1,1 and working well. I had upgraded the graphics, put in an SSD, and some pcie cards. My 1,1 was perfectly able to handle Mavericks, Yosemite, etc., but wasn't supported. Why? Because they want me to buy a new computer. Yes, I could've jumped through hoops and installed those OS's, but I went ahead and purchased a 5,1 because I'm a filmmaker and needed software that was no longer supported in mountain lion and I didn't want to jump through hoops. So I now have a 3.46 12 core beast with a pcie SSD drive that's faster than the new Mac Pro. I can flash and put any GPU that Apple requires for metal, as many have done, but SO WHAT! Apple is smart and they are aware that my Mac Pro 1,1 and our 3s and 4s and especially 5s are upgradable. So instead of them saying metal will only be supported with "such and such" GPU, they say 2012 and newer. The 4,1 and 5,1 are such well designed professional machines that Apple realized they were shooting themselves in the PC foot. I had my 1,1 for 10 years!! Never had a problem. I could upgrade the dual processors, pcie SSD, etc. Apple essentially said that we are not going to let you update your OS and if you want native support, you're gonna have to pay for it. Apple made the trash can Mac Pro with built in GPUs for a reason. When those GPUs don't cut it, and we're already seeing that happen with 4K, 5K and 6K editing (which I think is ridiculous by the way) compared to newer GPUs, you have to buy a new 3,000-8,000 dollar trash can or iMac or MBP. And why does that marketing strategy work? Cuz we keep buying them.
But hopefully I'm just long winded, and wrong.
I have a iMac 27" late 2012 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX with 2 GB. In my understanding with will support Metal, im pretty excited about that!
So I have 2 question maybe someone can answer me:
- Will OS X 10.11 be capable of dynamically which from Intel HD graphics to GTX 680MX (So actually make use of the integrated gpu)?
- Will it be possible with OS X 10.11 (Metal) to use both GPUs at the same time for full performance?
So I have 2 question maybe someone can answer me:
- Will OS X 10.11 be capable of dynamically which from Intel HD graphics to GTX 680MX (So actually make use of the integrated gpu)?
- Will it be possible with OS X 10.11 (Metal) to use both GPUs at the same time for full performance?
1. Current OSX already does that.I have a iMac 27" late 2012 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX with 2 GB. In my understanding with will support Metal, im pretty excited about that!
So I have 2 question maybe someone can answer me:
- Will OS X 10.11 be capable of dynamically which from Intel HD graphics to GTX 680MX (So actually make use of the integrated gpu)?
- Will it be possible with OS X 10.11 (Metal) to use both GPUs at the same time for full performance?
2. No.
1. Are you sure OSX does that on a iMac? As much I know only works on MacBooks Pro as the moment.
2. That's kind of sad. But understandable.
Ah, I missed the "iMac" part. And in fact, I can't find any documentation on wether or not they switch themselves!
AFAIK, the iGPU is deactivated in the the iMac, so probably no.
Contrary to the above poster, yes, it is possible to use multiple GPUs at the same time with Metal. But the GPU needs to be enabled (it is not in the iMac) and the support for multiple GPUs needs to be explicitly coded into the app. So even on dual-GPU systems, there will be no magical increase in performance. Then again, implementing simpler SLI-like renderers in Metal is fairly trivial.
hi leman
Thank yyour for your answer. So it's not going to happen for my iMac. Maybe in the future somewhen with new Apple Hardware. Maybe it's just not worth the effort comparing the performance gain out of it.
Thank yyour for your answer. So it's not going to happen for my iMac. Maybe in the future somewhen with new Apple Hardware. Maybe it's just not worth the effort comparing the performance gain out of it.
For games, combining the dGPU and the iGPU for the graphical operations is not likely to improve the performance (it might actually reduce it). However, it might make sense to use the iGPU for some compute work while the dGPU is busy with the graphics. For non-gaming applications, it really depends. The software developer should know best whether their app will benefit from multi-GPU code or not.
Now, if you are talking about UI drawing, there is practically no reason to ever even touch the dGPU, save in a few very specific, rare scenarios.
Is there a need. iMacs are mains powered desktops rather than battery powered portables. It would make more sense for the dGPU to be permanently activated as it would provide the best performance for the majority of applications.
Thinking about making this upgrade as well, how do you like the 7970? Glad to hear that your test for Metal was successful
It works well. You won't see any great improvement mundane tasks, but FCPX is faster which was the reason a I purchased it. It functions perfectly with no glitches just like the 5870, but it is more powerful, has more memory, and supports Metal. No complaints.
I have 7950 GPU and this is what I get with metalinfo and metaltest:
MetalInfo!
Metal Device Name: AMD Metal
Lower Power Device: No
Headless Device: No
logout
Saving session...
...copying shared history...
...saving history...truncating history files...
...completed.
Deleting expired sessions...6 completed.
Process: MetalTest [59663]
Path: /Users/USER/Downloads/*/MetalTest.app/Contents/MacOS/MetalTest
Identifier: org.netkas.MetalTest
Version: 1.0 (1)
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: MetalTest [59663]
User ID: 501
Date/Time: 2015-09-25 16:34:17.609 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.11 (15A282a)
Report Version: 11
Anonymous UUID: B9DB37A3-B904-157E-445F-AAEF9078C65D
Sleep/Wake UUID: 3CC73BAC-9C59-4BD5-A5DA-D3BDB572875D
Time Awake Since Boot: 54000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 4100 seconds
System Integrity Protection: disabled
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY
Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '+[MDLMesh newBox:segments:inwardNormals:geometryType:allocator:]: unrecognized selector sent to class 0x7fff75b4f560'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called
MetalInfo!
Metal Device Name: AMD Metal
Lower Power Device: No
Headless Device: No
logout
Saving session...
...copying shared history...
...saving history...truncating history files...
...completed.
Deleting expired sessions...6 completed.
Process: MetalTest [59663]
Path: /Users/USER/Downloads/*/MetalTest.app/Contents/MacOS/MetalTest
Identifier: org.netkas.MetalTest
Version: 1.0 (1)
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: MetalTest [59663]
User ID: 501
Date/Time: 2015-09-25 16:34:17.609 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.11 (15A282a)
Report Version: 11
Anonymous UUID: B9DB37A3-B904-157E-445F-AAEF9078C65D
Sleep/Wake UUID: 3CC73BAC-9C59-4BD5-A5DA-D3BDB572875D
Time Awake Since Boot: 54000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 4100 seconds
System Integrity Protection: disabled
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY
Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '+[MDLMesh newBox:segments:inwardNormals:geometryType:allocator:]: unrecognized selector sent to class 0x7fff75b4f560'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called