The reason why developers won't develop games for Mac is because Mac is bad at gaming. Literally. What you are saying is very ironic. Even Intel Mac is still suffering from lack of games compared to PC.
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You're Apple. You just built a 40-core SoC for Mac Pro. Now what?
- Thread starter senttoschool
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Even if Apple used macOS for a cloud computing system, they’d probably have to do a whole new branch, like they did for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS & watchOS. That, I’m sure is a huge undertaking. With Apple’s resources, they should be able to do it, but still extremely difficult.
I’m also old enough to remember when Apple made Xserves and the xServe Cluster node. Virginia Tech even built “System X” out of them, which was in the top 10 fastest supercomputers at the time. So it is possible for Apple to make servers. How willing Apple is to do it again is a different question
Nvidia insists on writing drivers for its hardware. Apple wants complete control over everything that goes into its devices. Their business models are incompatible. AMD is much more flexible and are willing to work with vendors for customized silicon, see also: Steam Deck. Nvidia's GPUs are impressive - at high power draws and with adequate cooling. They do not do well in thin and light devices, or if you want to build something with long battery life, or that can maintain performance levels on battery power. Apple's GPUs are much more power efficient. Nvidia would not and could not make something that would fit inside the MBA and still provide the same level of performance and battery life.
Given all this, Nvidia just isn't a good match for Apple's product line. So far we've seen just one Apple GPU in a Mac, but it already outperforms Intel and AMD's iGPUs, and can match low-end Nvidia dGPUs. Assuming this scales, Apple should finally be able to deliver competitive GPU performance in its lower end Macs, while keeping them thin and light, and maintaining good battery life.
Given all this, Nvidia just isn't a good match for Apple's product line. So far we've seen just one Apple GPU in a Mac, but it already outperforms Intel and AMD's iGPUs, and can match low-end Nvidia dGPUs. Assuming this scales, Apple should finally be able to deliver competitive GPU performance in its lower end Macs, while keeping them thin and light, and maintaining good battery life.
My god, what will we do without diet tf2? The horror that we won’t be able to play an actiblizz lootbox sim because they’re incapable of using libraries from this decade. Also, lol, Paladins.Most renderers to my knowledge either use cuda or cpu which is much slower than cuda.
EDIT: Dang turns out it really is the standard. Didnt realize how many programs relied on cuda and now RTX until i searched.
Your Favorite Creative Apps Accelerated With NVIDIA GPUs
Create At The Speed of Imaginationwww.nvidia.com
I think its absurd to expect devs to develop for such a small base when you keep restricting their tools. There comes a point where it isnt financially worth it and when you make that many hoops to jump through just to get it to work on macs then many devs will call it quits.
But dont take my word for it. Its one of the biggest reasons why my fav games arent on mac
This Is Why Overwatch Is Not Coming to the Mac
Overwatch won't be coming to the Mac according to a statement by the game's lead engineer. Here' why.gadgets.ndtv.com
"We have no plans of giving this game on the Mac. There are several technology decisions that Apple has made that has made it a little difficult for us to release Overwatch in the way we want it to be consumed, and that is why we haven’t pursued it," said Tim Ford, Lead Engineer on Overwatch at Blizzard to Gadgets 360 on the sidelines of BlizzCon 2017."
"When macOS released the Catalina update on October 7, 2019, we discovered that their new OS is no longer capable of supporting Paladins due to their removal of all 32-bit code from the latest update.
Unfortunately, these changes are forcing us to remove Mac support for Paladins following our latest update, A Tigron’s Tale."
All I’m reading is complaining that Apple doesn’t use the preferred flavor of gpus that company x writes their software exclusively for. Company x gets a free pass because big ol Apple is mean for insisting they keep their code up to date once a decade.
QXP dragged their heels on keeping their software up to date and Adobe ate their lunch with indesign. Refusing to change with the times is an eventual death sentence. If company x adamantly refuses to use anything but NVidias proprietary language, then they tie themselves to NVidia. If NVidia falters (which may happen, I’m not confident in them) then company x will go down with them.
Your entire argument hinges on marketshare and not whether a better device can be made by going outside of it. If you’re concerned with marketshare then go back to Wintel. Going down that route just means Apple will just be another pc vendor in a sea of pc vendors.
If Apple have “built a better mousetrap” which I believe, the software will come. If other companies are adamant that they’ll be able to stay stagnant forever, then that’s on them.
It's not an easy thing to solve. The market share is one of the biggest problem for macOS and that's why many developers aren't supporting Mac at all even if the hardware is good. Also, you are ignoring the software aspect. Both hardware and software problem is the result of the market share. If you are not facing the fact, it won't gonna solve forever and that's what happened to macOS. Mac used to be a great platform with more software than Windows. But not anymore. macOS isn't that widely used unlike what you are thinking.
In fact, in terms of market share and support, Wintel is still dominating the most computer market and there are so many reasons why Wintel is good. You can not ignore the market share cause that's the fact. How come developers aren't developing software for macOS? It's because of macOS itself. Software will NOT come automatically even if the device is good. It's all about the platform.
It's such a complicated problem for both hardware and software. You can't make things simple about this issue.
You don't think that it's a problem that a whole industry is tied to a single GPU manufacturer? AMD wouldn't be able to compete even if they had the fastest GPUs on earth because they would still have no CUDA support. I don't know what the solution to this problem is but dumping every other GPU manufacturer and tying your future to the future of a certain GPU vendor sure ain't it. I'm glad that there are alternatives.
You and me both. My university's physics dept. had one of those, and I borrowed time on it when I got my PhD in chemistry. But still, I think the bigger market that the OP had in mind was the general linux-based server market, and Apple might not find whatever chip they design to be significantly more efficient than whatever generation of Graviton chip is current at the time.
Simple, Nvidia's GPU performance is better than AMD and Nvidia made CUDA. A lot of software like 3D heavily rely on CUDA and there is no other option. That's a dirty truth about the industry. Truth be told, Nvidia is the one who is leading the GPU market and AMD is still not able to make something powerful enough to compete 3090 or higher ends. Even RX 6000 series are bad compared to RTX 30 series. For workstation, I wouldn't even talk about it. All they can do is sell their GPU cheaper until they can make better GPU.
For example, there are way more Nvidia friendly games than AMD friendly games because Nvidia's support and technology is way better than AMD. The developer from Arkham night said that Nvidia provided all resources while AMD didn't. Also, Nvidia's external GPU market share is near 80% in 2020 and that tells everything about Nvidia. AMD is still far from competing with Nvidia and that's why they are providing customization service for xbox, play station, Mac, and more. It's only a few years ago since AMD rise again with Ryzen.
Anyway, since many software are optimized for CUDA, it's very difficult to ask developers to optimize their software for Metal API especially since macOS's market share is way lower than Windows. They will not spend their time and money for less profits and they have no reasons to support macOS while Nvidia is dominating the market in PC and else. The most important thing is Mac's GPU performance is poor and not supporting Nvidia GPU. I dont think it will solve the problem especially since Apple is making their own GPU. At this point, having a powerful Apple GPU will not guarantee anything since the market share for macOS is really low.
For now, we might need to hope Intel to develop their own GPU so that they can compete with Nvidia in future.
It's actually a weird situation where people who would typically complain about Apple's "proprietary lock-in" with Metal think the solution is to encourage even more lock-in with Nvidia's CUDA.
I find this situation infuriating. Yes, CUDA is a de-facto standard for GPU compute, but we only got there because Nvidia has been abusing their position as a market leader and suffocating every open initiative (OpenCL was developed by Apple btw., and Nvidia has effectively killed it). I remember very well how it started - they have released a user-friendly toolkit (Cg) that worked on all GPUs, and once they had enough users they turned it into Nvidia-only CUDA. At the time they were basically a market monopolist and their tools very indeed superior, so the industry Follower like a dumb puppy. Now Nvidia has everyone firmly in their grip. They’ve been doing similar things to Vulkan btw, blocking useful API functionality and using their influence to push features that benefit their hardware (like mesh shaders). Why do you think Metal supports arbitrary nested resource bindings that can be manipulated from the shader but Vulkan and DX12 only support flat tables?
Anyway, I surprisingly find myself in full agreement with Thorvalds and say “f*** Nvidia”. The sooner we can get away from that monopolist the better. In fact, I have big hopes for Apple GPUs, Apple has the technology and the momentum to change things.
I think Metal support is larger than Cuda support right now since any iOS app has to use Metal anyway. Example: Capture One just released an update saying that they have native M1 support now, and they said that they had to completely rewrite some parts of the app for this and now that's done, they can release in iPad app as well, which comes as a byproduct of doing all this work.
So basically getting out an iPad app was a big reason to do all this.
More developers will start to see the tablet/phone+Mac market as a whole, exactly like Phase One did.
This was one of the first things I mentioned a while back.
Computing Power per unit Electric Power of the Apple Silicon RISC++ vs CISC based energy hungry Servers.
Adobe and Capture One may support Metal but most of other software aren't even supporting Metal. Like I said, for 3D and machine learning, CUDA is still dominating. Metal is just for Apple software, nothing more. The market share proves it.
iPhone+iPad apps on macOS is useless and failure. It's been more than 1 year since they announced the transition and yet most mobile apps on macOS are either terrible or useless. Apple doesn't even allow side loading while Windows 11 will bring side loading and more apps than what macOS do including popular apps like tiktok.
Capture one did not until couple months ago either. They all will support it because they all will release iOS versions of their apps at some point. Nobody wants to leave all the iPad marketshare to someone else.
Capture One Pro is a Mac friendly software for a long time like Adobe so it's not unexpected. To be honest, there are more Mac users than PC users.
But what about other PC software? Will they going to support Metal API? You see, so far, only Mac friendly software are willing to support Metal API cause they have quite a lot of Mac users that they can not ignore. But most of software aren't Mac friendly and macOS market share is too low and therefore, no reason to support Metal API.
CUDA being the de-facto standard for 3D compute is slowly changing. Redshift and Octane both have MacOS "Metal" versions now.
OpenGL is still widely used in 3D and CAD apps for viewport rendering.
Developers should *want* to use Metal if they are programming for Macs because that is where Apple is shoving the money towards.
Back a couple years, Premiere on the Mac would let you choose between Metal, OpenCL or CUDA for compute. At the time CUDA was of course the fastest, but required a NVidia GPU (but at that time, AMD was not challenging NVidia all that much); but Metal was not far behind. Apple has been developing Metal to target AMD GPUs and now their own silicon. About the only reason CUDA generally comes out on top is because it is a very mature API. Metal is a relative baby compared to it, so the fact that it can even compete somewhat is actually pretty amazing.
AMD is now playing the long game, and we have just seen what they have done to Intel; and guess what, they are about to do the same thing to NVidia; but we also can not count out Intel, who has their own plans, and also supposedly 3Dfx is back from the dead about to release something.
OpenGL is still widely used in 3D and CAD apps for viewport rendering.
Developers should *want* to use Metal if they are programming for Macs because that is where Apple is shoving the money towards.
Back a couple years, Premiere on the Mac would let you choose between Metal, OpenCL or CUDA for compute. At the time CUDA was of course the fastest, but required a NVidia GPU (but at that time, AMD was not challenging NVidia all that much); but Metal was not far behind. Apple has been developing Metal to target AMD GPUs and now their own silicon. About the only reason CUDA generally comes out on top is because it is a very mature API. Metal is a relative baby compared to it, so the fact that it can even compete somewhat is actually pretty amazing.
AMD is now playing the long game, and we have just seen what they have done to Intel; and guess what, they are about to do the same thing to NVidia; but we also can not count out Intel, who has their own plans, and also supposedly 3Dfx is back from the dead about to release something.
This was always like this. Mac marketshare was always below Windows marketshare by orders of magnitude. But with Metal and Mac Silicon, Apple did an amazing move. Now when you write your code for ARM and Metal, it works on all Macs and all iOS devices, so suddenly you have a market 20 times larger than before.
What? That's not how it works and iOS apps aren't optimized to macOS at all and you can't even use Mac apps on iOS devices. Clearly, you have no idea what you are saying. Same API does not mean they are compatible each other. They are in a different market and I don't think the market share will be larger just because that you can use a mobile app on macOS.
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MacOS and iOS share the same APIs. If you write your GPU code using Metal on iOS, it will work on macOS without changes. You still have to write different frontends, but the business/computational code is the same.
P.S. Please, for my sake, educate yourself.
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Same API does NOT mean they can use on different OS right away. How come iOS developers aren't willing to support their apps on macOS? Most of them are trash and not even optimized. Same thing for the opposite.
Clearly, you are the one who needs to be educated.
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That has nothing to do with the discussion. Developers of individual app have their reasons whether to let their apps under macOS or not. We are discussing GPU programming and APIs here, not user experience.
I've been developing software for over twenty years now. They even trust me enough to let me teach this stuff to postgraduates. I think I'll take a university board opinion over yours.
It does. I've been talking about the same thing since the beginning and yet, you changed the topic. Capture One Pro does not work directly on iPadOS. Instead, they need to make a new one. I already explained that apps need to be optimized. What you are saying is totally nonsense. Using iOS on macOS is already a failure. What more do I need to explain?
So? You still didn't explain this at all: "Now when you write your code for ARM and Metal, it works on all Macs and all iOS devices, so suddenly you have a market 20 times larger than before." This is totally delusional and Apple already failed with using iOS apps on macOS because of their stupid restrictions. You only thinks about the same API but it's not a simple story. I thought you know this well?
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Do you really not see what the point is? Yes there are UX differences between a touch-centric iPad/iPhone and a mouse-centric computer as well as screen real estate UI considerations, so there are things devs need to do if they want a proper UX on each device, but it’s not like you have to write the program from scratch. Even if you choose to only allow the app on ipad/Mac that’s still a huge market.
Because their original app was not designed for the iPad. This has nothing to do with the GPU programming per se.
Using Metal allows your app to run directly on all modern Apple hardware, from the iPhone to the Mac. If your design your app accordingly, you can access a large market without having to code the things twice.
Example: Pixelmator — they took their powerful image editing engine (developed for the Mac), designed a suitable new UI for it and published it as native iPhone and iPad apps. The UI code is different on each platform, the underlying code is the same. This also allows them to release new features in sync for all platforms without having to duplicate the work.
The iPad and the Mac now run exactly the same hardware. What do you want to be "optimizing"? The problem is not some sort of mythical "optimization", it's user experience.
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I told you, iOS developers aren't even interested in supporting macOS from Mac App Store and it's a fact. I don't care about the same API, it just doesn't work on different OS right away and therefore, it's useless. Also, who even wanna spend their time and money on their mobile apps to macOS? It's been more than 1 year since Apple Silicon transition announced with the transition kit and yet the amount of mobile apps on Mac store is so pathetically poor. They don't even allow side loading. Are there even useful iPad apps on Mac App Store that we can use? Even iPad suffer from lack of optimization from iOS apps so I don't find this as a special case or already expected. This is why what we were expecting is delusional.
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