OS X Metal for OS X?

antonis · Mar 26, 2015

Actually, blizzard games are not the paragon of performance equality between OS X and Windows. They usually show a big performance gap between the two platforms, that other games do not (especially the ones from feral and aspyr).

For instance - at least until a few months ago - Diablo 3 had exactly double the FPS between OS X and Windows (favoring the latter, of course) on the very same hardware. This was tested on an older iMac model as much as a latest Mac Pro.

koyoot · Mar 27, 2015

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9112/exploring-dx12-3dmark-api-overhead-feature-test/5

AMD won everything with this. Mantle is basically DX12 and Vulkan.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37282146&postcount=13

Funniest part. You dont have to optimize cards for specific game, but you will have to optimize cards for specific API. Which in roots is Mantle. That is a game changer. Performance, optimization, costs. Everything gets in place.

There is one thing...

AnandTech said:
Wrapping things up, Futuremark’s latest benchmark certainly gives us a new view on DirectX 12, and of course another data point in looking at the performance of the forthcoming API.

Since being announced last year – and really, since Mantle was announced in 2013 – the initial focus on low-level APIs has been on draw call throughput, and for good reason. The current high-level API paradigm has significant CPU overhead and at the same time fails to scale well with multiple CPU cores, leading to a sort of worst-case scenario for trying to push draw calls. At the same time console developers have low enjoyed lower-level access and the accompanying improvement in draw calls, a benefit that is an issue for the PC in the age of so many multiplatform titles.

This API in fact was designed for architectures like Apple's A7 chip. Macroscalar/Superscalar whatever you can call it.

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019
http://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-graphics-apis/
^^ this.

AndreGB · Mar 29, 2015

Ferazel said:
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.

If I were you, I wouldn't put all my expectations on that. As you said yourself, Vulkan's specs aren't finalized yet. They expect to have something done by the end of the year, but I would say Q2 2016 is more realistic. That said, Apple may only bet on anything related to Vulkan after 10.12.

The good thing about Vulkan is that its drivers are super simple to develop. My only concern with Vulkan on OS X is that Vulkan actually gives developers the power to "break" the GPU. So there is that one seed of fear inside me saying Apple might never ever adopt Vulkan on OS X.

We'll see.

antonis · Mar 29, 2015

AndreGB said:
My only concern with Vulkan on OS X is that Vulkan actually gives developers the power to "break" the GPU.

You mean like causing permanent damage to it ? Isn't the h/w able to protect itself of such a case ?

leman · Mar 29, 2015

AndreGB said:
My only concern with Vulkan on OS X is that Vulkan actually gives developers the power to "break" the GPU. So there is that one seed of fear inside me saying Apple might never ever adopt Vulkan on OS X. We'll see.

Well, the worst thing that could happen should be an application crash. Sure, a buggy application could probably crash the GPU, but that is less dramatic than it sounds. A properly coded Vulkan app will need to respond to device change/recovery anyway, so a GPU hang will simply result in a GPU reboot + request that all applications rebuild their state. These things are usually handled by the OpenGL driver implicitly (although Apple's OpenGL framework for example includes user-side device changes for GPU switching and multi-GPU support).

AndreGB · Mar 30, 2015

antonis said:
You mean like causing permanent damage to it ? Isn't the h/w able to protect itself of such a case ?

Hi Antonis, no, not break physically nor permanently. But it could put your whole machine into an unusable state, requiring a hard reboot (like when you hold the power button). Leman has also developed a little more into it.

antonis · Mar 30, 2015

AndreGB said:
Hi Antonis, no, not break physically nor permanently. But it could put your whole machine into an unusable state, requiring a hard reboot (like when you hold the power button). Leman has also developed a little more into it.

Ah thanks for the clarification. I assume that this is because it goes low level and "speaks" directly to the h/w, then. Extra performance always has its toll, usually in the stability context, too. Something that Apple might not see it in a very positive manner.

UniDoubleU · Mar 30, 2015

antonis said:
Ah thanks for the clarification. I assume that this is because it goes low level and "speaks" directly to the h/w, then. Extra performance always has its toll, usually in the stability context, too. Something that Apple might not see it in a very positive manner.

Hey, it might give them bragging rights like this... "Due to deep integrations between our beautiful hardware and software we are pleased to announce that OSX 10.11 Yellowstone is the fastest OSX ever with up to 75% improvements in performance compared to Yosemite."

antonis · Mar 31, 2015

UniDoubleU said:
Hey, it might give them bragging rights like this... "Due to deep integrations between our beautiful hardware and software we are pleased to announce that OSX 10.11 Yellowstone is the fastest OSX ever with up to 75% improvements in performance compared to Yosemite."

Hehe "bragging rights"

I hope that they'll keep Metal for iOS and adopt Vulcan for OS X. If they don't, it will be obvious then that they don't plan to jump on the gaming train ever. If every other platform settle to use a unified API and Apple keep on their own, things will get really ugly for OS X.

leman · Mar 31, 2015

antonis said:
Ah thanks for the clarification. I assume that this is because it goes low level and "speaks" directly to the h/w, then. Extra performance always has its toll, usually in the stability context, too. Something that Apple might not see it in a very positive manner.

Well, applications already have quite low level access to some very critical hardware components such as CPU, RAM and storage

Giving them low-level access to the GPU does not really make things any worse

BTW, GPU reboots are not that uncommon on OS X or Windows. In fact, OS X does it behind the scenes quite often when doing GPU switching. Sometimes the driver might crash, then you get a quick screen flicker and the system restores. So its really not that big a deal.

koyoot · Mar 31, 2015

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading

Well, is there anything to add?

leman · Mar 31, 2015

koyoot said:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading

Well, is there anything to add?

To be fair, you could do stuff like this with OpenGL and OpenCL for quite some time now. Af course, async dispatch is included in Mantle and I guess it will also be part of Vulkan.

Edit: I might have been a bit hasty here. I was referring to the fact that you can submit multiple related tasks via OpenGL/OpenCL. There is of course no guarantee that the GPU will execute them simultaneously, as it happens to be the case with AMD.

P.S. From what I understand, Intel's GPUs have had the ability to execute asynchronous programs for some time now. But I might be misreading the documentation.

koyoot · Mar 31, 2015

Leman, you are correct. AsynchComp is one of the tastiest things about Intel iGPUs.

P.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3dUhep0rBs&hootPostID=aef75ef805e1baf1d0ca6791d9220f00

I think its the best illustration of what were talking about.

antonis · Mar 31, 2015

leman said:
Well, applications already have quite low level access to some very critical hardware components such as CPU, RAM and storage Giving them low-level access to the GPU does not really make things any worse

BTW, GPU reboots are not that uncommon on OS X or Windows. In fact, OS X does it behind the scenes quite often when doing GPU switching. Sometimes the driver might crash, then you get a quick screen flicker and the system restores. So its really not that big a deal.

Well, applications do have access to all these things but not directly. They access the h/w by using system calls - or to put it in other words, asking from someone else to do the real access for them (that is the OS). This allows the operating system to stand in the middle and control this access, so it prevents the worst of the situations by a bad-coded application. This is also the reason that different operating systems need different ports of an application, even when running on the same h/w. System hangs do happen, but rarely lead to a full reboot (like a kernel panic does) as the operating system is usually much better written than any other application running on top of it. Otherwise, we'd need a reboot several times during a session.

Not sure about this Vulcan, but I got the impression from the above posts that it actually goes to the GPU in a more direct manner (e.g. partially bypassing the OS GPU driver and does some things by itself) in order to achieve this extra performance. IIRC directx also does (or did) something similar.

You're right, practically there's not much difference in stability anymore (directx is very matured of course, after all these years). I just hope that apple will not use the "stability" excuse in order to miss this train, cause they'll be left seriously behind.

leman · Mar 31, 2015

antonis said:
Not sure about this Vulcan, but I got the impression from the above posts that it actually goes to the GPU in a more direct manner (e.g. partially bypassing the OS GPU driver and does some things by itself) in order to achieve this extra performance. IIRC directx also does (or did) something similar.

That view is a bit oversimplified. Let me put it like this: you get much more direct access to most other system components than what Vulkan gives you with the GPU. The main reason why the OS can prevent buggy applications from crashing the entire system is that every app runs in its own virtual 'container', isolated from the rest of the system. It is not that different with modern GPUs. As said before, worst case scenario all data on the GPU can be lost, but the main application can still recover by reloading it.

antonis said:
I just hope that apple will not use the "stability" excuse in order to miss this train, cause they'll be left seriously behind.

Apple is among Vulkan contributors and it has designed its own low-overhead API for iOS, so they are definitely interested in these things. Vulkan gives them the chance to ditch OpenGL for something much more efficient that requires less development effort for them, is more stable out of the box, and is pretty much guaranteed to give them 3D performance parity with Windows (more or less). Not to mention that the design of Vulkan is very close to how Apple is already treating OpenGL. I can't imagine they would be against this opportunity, the benefits for Apple are just too big.

antonis · Apr 1, 2015

leman said:
That view is a bit oversimplified. Let me put it like this: you get much more direct access to most other system components than what Vulkan gives you with the GPU. The main reason why the OS can prevent buggy applications from crashing the entire system is that every app runs in its own virtual 'container', isolated from the rest of the system. It is not that different with modern GPUs. As said before, worst case scenario all data on the GPU can be lost, but the main application can still recover by reloading it.

Apple is among Vulkan contributors and it has designed its own low-overhead API for iOS, so they are definitely interested in these things. Vulkan gives them the chance to ditch OpenGL for something much more efficient that requires less development effort for them, is more stable out of the box, and is pretty much guaranteed to give them 3D performance parity with Windows (more or less). Not to mention that the design of Vulkan is very close to how Apple is already treating OpenGL. I can't imagine they would be against this opportunity, the benefits for Apple are just too big.

I admit that I oversimplified it; I just want to keep it readable by everyone

For everything else, fingers crossed. If apple has contributed in Vulcan, it would be indeed insane to skip it for OS X. Here's to a brighter future in apple gaming.

knightlie · Apr 2, 2015

soulsyphon said:
http://www.amazon.com/MSI-GS70-STEA...&qid=1426376872&sr=8-1&keywords=msi+gs70+970m

also this one

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NVV2B98/ref=psdc_565108_t2_B00O65HR6A

these laptops > their imac or macbook retina pro

also costs a lot less.

i'm done with apple myself, i own the msi laptop but an earlier version with 870m i bought in july 2014, i used to buy macbooks but got sick of it.

i have an iphone 5 32gb, but i'm going to upgrade to samsung galaxy s6 once its out... completely done with apple, no more thank you.

Okay, bye. *chuckle*

Ishayu · Apr 2, 2015

I don't honestly know how anyone can claim Apple cares about gaming on the Mac at this point. I saw so much defense of Apple on the gaming front in here it honestly made me laugh.

Here's every single currently available Apple product and why it's not good for gamers:

- MacBook is completely incapable of running the vast majority of games. It's about as fast as a low-end 2011 MacBook Air, which was already so low end that barely any games ran.
- MacBook Air is capable of running games at the bare minimum settings with terrible framerates. It works, but it gives a poor experience.
- The MacBook Pro fares little better than the Air due to a terrible integrated GPU from Intel. Only when upgrading to the ridiculously expensive top-of-the-line 15" model will you get an external GPU. You can get better GPU's in laptops with similar form factors even from expensive brands like Razer.

Note that all these laptops have VERY high resolution displays in addition to their crappy GPU's. There's no way in hell any game will run at 60 FPS at maximum resolution even at minimum settings on any of these machines.

There is simply no viable MacBook gaming product available. At all. It doesn't exist.

Moving on to the desktops:
- Mac Mini is about as capable of playing games as a MacBook Air - which i to say not terribly capable.
- The iMac is probably the gamer's best bet from Apple. Unfortunately, it's a non-upgradeable laptop in the disguise, meaning that it's overpriced for the performance and isn't future proof.
- The retina display iMac is so high resolution that, even with a top of the line mobile GPU - which Apple for some reason got from AMD which was a terrible decision in this particular case - there are very few games that will run at a decent clip at native resolution. However, to be fair, iMac's will play games somewhat well regardless. It's a viable option, but overpriced due to its design.
- The Mac Pro is the only Mac that really delivers the kind of performance a gamer wants. Unfortunately, it's professional grade hardware with a price tag to match. In addition, even though it has two GPU's, the CrossFire bridge is disabled in OS X, cutting performance squarely in half unless you install Boot Camp. This makes the Mac Pro ridiculously overpriced for the performance. It is also non-upgradeable on the most important component: The GPU.

And that's just the hardware. The software fares no better, with the current version of OpenGL on Mac OS X Yosemite being about 4 years behind the times. The performance is so bad that most porting companies have elected to simply not update their games to OpenGL 3.0, let alone 4.0, including Blizzard Entertainment. The performance difference can be up to 2x in favor of Windows regardless of whether the test hardware is a real Mac or not.

In addition, the OS X OpenGL implementation is reluctant to frameskip, and will often attempt to slow the game down instead to get all the frames rendered instead before giving up. This is particularly visible with VSync on. While this does cause less stutter in professional rendering, for realtime rendering in gaming this is beyond terrible.

This is on top of a mouse acceleration code that actually delays the mouse's response time by at least 20ms, so even if we assume we had a powerful Mac that could run the latest games at 1080p60 at maximum settings, the Mac would STILL be a terrible platform for pro-gaming. You can disable this with some very eloborate applications, though.

I really hope they improve this situation substantially - because I do like my 2011 15" MacBook Pro otherwise, and I'd like to buy an Apple Laptop next time. But if this keeps up? No way in hell.

iOS is another story, fortunately. Gaming on iOS is great.

EDIT: I have no idea why my post got posted twice. Oh well, it's gone now.

And yes, I know these alternatives to Macs skimp on other hardware components to get the cost down, and that this is why they can deliver great gaming performance to price ratio. Their hardware is not overall better in many cases - but for this very specific case where gaming performance is important, they suck. Utterly and totally suck.

edddeduck · Apr 2, 2015

Ishayu said:
I don't honestly know how anyone can claim Apple cares about gaming on the Mac at this point. I saw so much defense of Apple on the gaming front in here it honestly made me laugh.

I hate to be the one to tell you but your extended description of Mac hardware isn't going to change any minds. Everyone KNOWS what the limitations and benefits of the Mac platform are and they have made the choice to go with OS X and Macs. If you want to make a different choice then that's cool too but telling Mac users that Apple use Intel integrated GPUs and these are not great for playing at high settings isn't news

Sure a few people might blindly argue something silly but most people on this forum know the score and have made their choice.

Ishayu said:
You can get better GPU's in laptops with similar form factors even from expensive brands like Razer.

I'd have to call you on that last line you can get way better GPUs in other laptops but not in similar form factors. I have a gaming laptop for Linux gaming development, it's great and more powerful than the rMBP. It's also got a power supply the size of a brick and weighs twice as much.

It's a balance between many factors, Apple target weight, size, battery life and quality of finish above GPU performance and expansion. It's how they have always worked so I don't see them changing any time soon.

Ishayu said:
The performance is so bad that most porting companies have elected to simply not update their games to OpenGL 3.0, let alone 4.0, including Blizzard Entertainment. The performance difference can be up to 2x in favor of Windows regardless of whether the test hardware is a real Mac or not.

We haven't shipped an OpenGL 2.x game in a few years now, most things since 10.9 shipped have started to use OpenGL 4.x as we need the features but I can see how some companies might not want to spend the effort to upgrade their engines.

Ishayu said:
In addition, the OS X OpenGL implementation is reluctant to frameskip, and will often attempt to slow the game down instead to get all the frames rendered instead before giving up. This is particularly visible with VSync on. While this does cause less stutter in professional rendering, for realtime rendering in gaming this is beyond terrible.

I don't think this is anything to do with Apple's GL.

Ishayu said:
This is on top of a mouse acceleration code that actually delays the mouse's response time by at least 20ms, so even if we assume we had a powerful Mac that could run the latest games at 1080p60 at maximum settings, the Mac would STILL be a terrible platform for pro-gaming. You can disable this with some very eloborate applications, though.

You can poll the USB input directly (this is usually called RAW input)so mouse acceleration lag is purely down to the drivers you might have installed, however with no drivers you can directly access the mouse deltas without any lag (apart from the USB round trip which is similar to windows).

If you do have drivers installed they usual block the direct mouse deltas meaning the driver inputs have to be used but again this is not an Apple issue but the mouse driver companies for blocking the inputs. I know all this from bitter experience of having to use the driver polling method on any games as if you use RAW input the mouse drivers block access and you get no mouse inputs in game! Annoying I am sure you can agree but this is a driver bug not an OS X one.

Edwin

leman · Apr 2, 2015

Ishayu said:
There is simply no viable MacBook gaming product available. At all. It doesn't exist.

There are games and there are games. Nobody is going to run competitive shooters on a Mac the hardware is just not there. But great games like Cities Skylines can run just fine on Intel's integrated GPU and Vulkan would make them run even better.

You seem to be one of those persons who completely ignores the fact that the majority gamers play games for entertainment, and do it casually. I have been playing tons of games on my now ancient 650M and I am absolutely satisfied with the performance. Don't come telling me that my laptop is not 'viable for gaming'.

Ishayu said:
You can get better GPU's in laptops with similar form factors even from expensive brands like Razer.

... that get that better GPU in by severely sacrificing the battery...

Ishayu said:
Note that all these laptops have VERY high resolution displays in addition to their crappy GPU's. There's no way in hell any game will run at 60 FPS at maximum resolution even at minimum settings on any of these machines.

Here we go again

If you expect to run games at 60 fps at those resolutions on a ultra-portable laptop, then you are being delusional in the first place. 'Pro gaming' is an absolute minority and Macs are certainly not catering to that group.

Ishayu said:
And that's just the hardware. The software fares no better, with the current version of OpenGL on Mac OS X Yosemite being about 4 years behind the times.

Typical elitist gamer attitude, so opinionated, but understanding nothing about graphics technology or APIs. What exactly does GL 4.4 have that would make it more beneficial for games like WoW? Most games that exist for Mac are absolutely happy using the feature equivalent of 3.2 or lower because they do not need the advanced features of later versions.

And sure, OpenGL drivers suck. The reasons for this have been discussed ad nauseum, among other places in this very thread.

Ishayu said:
In addition, the OS X OpenGL implementation is reluctant to frameskip, and will often attempt to slow the game down instead to get all the frames rendered instead before giving up. This is particularly visible with VSync on. While this does cause less stutter in professional rendering, for realtime rendering in gaming this is beyond terrible.

Timing the frames and adjusting the workload/presentations times is the task of the software and not of the driver. Blame poor game coding.

Ishayu · Apr 3, 2015

edddeduck said:
I hate to be the one to tell you but your extended description of Mac hardware isn't going to change any minds. Everyone KNOWS what the limitations and benefits of the Mac platform are and they have made the choice to go with OS X and Macs. If you want to make a different choice then that's cool too but telling Mac users that Apple use Intel integrated GPUs and these are not great for playing at high settings isn't news

Sure a few people might blindly argue something silly but most people on this forum know the score and have made their choice.

I suppose I did get a bit rantish, yes. Sorry about that.

However, saying it isn't news is not actually entirely correct. It's true that it's not news to people around on this site, but just going back to 2011 the complaint that I just made wasn't really valid. The HD6770M in 2011 MacBook Pro's is a fairly competent mid-range mobile GPU, and it is certainly discrete as well.

The last iteration of the Mac Pro was also fully upgradeable even by PC standards.

In actual fact, putting extremely crappy non-upgradeable graphics components in their machines is a fairly new thing for Apple. Recently, it's been getting even worse. It's now impossible to get a discrete GPU in a portable Mac without going full retard on the highest end model.

A 1.1GHz processor in any machine from Apple was unthinkable just a year ago - and yet here it is.

edddeduck said:
I'd have to call you on that last line you can get way better GPUs in other laptops but not in similar form factors. I have a gaming laptop for Linux gaming development, it's great and more powerful than the rMBP. It's also got a power supply the size of a brick and weighs twice as much.

It's a balance between many factors, Apple target weight, size, battery life and quality of finish above GPU performance and expansion. It's how they have always worked so I don't see them changing any time soon.

Razer Blade is as thin as a rMBP and has far more graphics horsepower and a similar size screen. The battery is also about the same. And that's just one example off the top of my head. It's also cheaper.

I don't want it though because I still think the price to performance ratio is too low. If I am to buy an Apple laptop again, it needs to have a little more heft to it and actually deliver some performance. I suppose that's just me having different priorities than what Apple has at this time. I think the 2011 MBP's were good, but they're getting outdated.

edddeduck said:
We haven't shipped an OpenGL 2.x game in a few years now, most things since 10.9 shipped have started to use OpenGL 4.x as we need the features but I can see how some companies might not want to spend the effort to upgrade their engines.

Blizzard chose to create an OpenGL 2.x engine for World of Warcraft even when OpenGL 3.x was available on the Mac and they were developing a DirectX 11 engine for the Windows platform. They said outright that the reason they did this was because OpenGL 3.x ran terribly. I can confirm this is also the case on your more recent porting efforts.

I'm not going to go further into it because I'm seeing it on EVERYTHING and so I truly don't believe this is your fault.

edddeduck said:
I don't think this is anything to do with Apple's GL.

It does. I've been able to demonstrate it with a simple GLUT+OpenGL3.x program.

edddeduck said:
You can poll the USB input directly (this is usually called RAW input)so mouse acceleration lag is purely down to the drivers you might have installed, however with no drivers you can directly access the mouse deltas without any lag (apart from the USB round trip which is similar to windows).

If you do have drivers installed they usual block the direct mouse deltas meaning the driver inputs have to be used but again this is not an Apple issue but the mouse driver companies for blocking the inputs. I know all this from bitter experience of having to use the driver polling method on any games as if you use RAW input the mouse drivers block access and you get no mouse inputs in game! Annoying I am sure you can agree but this is a driver bug not an OS X one.

The fact that you have to go low-level and poll USB devices manually to get acceptable gaming performance is a very big part of my point. You should never ever ever have to do something like that.

Just FYI, I do respect your company a great deal and I love your porting efforts. I'm just unbelievably frustrated with Apple.

Ishayu · Apr 3, 2015

leman said:
There are games and there are games. Nobody is going to run competitive shooters on a Mac — the hardware is just not there. But great games like Cities Skylines can run just fine on Intel's integrated GPU and Vulkan would make them run even better.

You seem to be one of those persons who completely ignores the fact that the majority gamers play games for entertainment, and do it casually. I have been playing tons of games on my now ancient 650M and I am absolutely satisfied with the performance. Don't come telling me that my laptop is not 'viable for gaming'.

People aren't going to run a competitive shooter on a Mac because it's effectively impossible. There's nothing inherent about a Mac as a platform that would make it a bad choice, but the priorities of Apple are such that it is.

Cities Skylines doesn't run at above 30 FPS on minimum settings on HD4600 - I have tried. I can get it to run at a decent framerate with the HD6770M though, but only barely.

I am hopeful for Vulkan, though! Mapping OpenGL functions to Vulkan and only having to write drivers for the much smaller Vulkan API, which Apple appears to be backing, could potentially solve all of this stuff. It's exciting, and I do hope Apple can manage to capitalise on it.

leman said:
... that get that better GPU in by severely sacrificing the battery...

This was the case back in 2011, but not anymore. PC manufacturers have mastered the art of switching the discrete GPU on or off depending on need like Apple has done for a very long time.

leman said:
Here we go again If you expect to run games at 60 fps at those resolutions on a ultra-portable laptop, then you are being delusional in the first place. 'Pro gaming' is an absolute minority and Macs are certainly not catering to that group.

Competitive gamers are an absolute minority?! Just what planet are you living on? xD The PC gaming market is absolutely gargantuan - at least 100 million active users.

I'm not expecting the game to run at high resolution on Apple's currently ultra-portable line-up. The point that I'm making is there needs to be products that focus on performance over ultra-portability - especially in the desktop space.

leman said:
Typical elitist gamer attitude, so opinionated, but understanding nothing about graphics technology or APIs. What exactly does GL 4.4 have that would make it more beneficial for games like WoW? Most games that exist for Mac are absolutely happy using the feature equivalent of 3.2 or lower because they do not need the advanced features of later versions.

And sure, OpenGL drivers suck. The reasons for this have been discussed ad nauseum, among other places in this very thread.

Hi, I'm a software engineer. 'Sup.

World of Warcraft, specifically, could benefit from Direct State Access and DirectX 11 emulation features for easy porting of their new Windows rendering stack - the lack of which is currently locking out a large portion of the high-end graphics features on Mac OS X.

And that's just the OpenGL4.4 features.

leman said:
Timing the frames and adjusting the workload/presentations times is the task of the software and not of the driver. Blame poor game coding.

Swap interval is controlled by platform specific extensions. The Mac OS X one does as I have described.

koyoot · Apr 3, 2015

Ishayu said:
People aren't going to run a competitive shooter on a Mac because it's effectively impossible. There's nothing inherent about a Mac as a platform that would make it a bad choice, but the priorities of Apple are such that it is.

Cities Skylines doesn't run at above 30 FPS on minimum settings on HD4600 - I have tried. I can get it to run at a decent framerate with the HD6770M though, but only barely.

I am hopeful for Vulkan, though! Mapping OpenGL functions to Vulkan and only having to write drivers for the much smaller Vulkan API, which Apple appears to be backing, could potentially solve all of this stuff. It's exciting, and I do hope Apple can manage to capitalise on it.

Competitive gamers are an absolute minority?! Just what planet are you living on? xD The PC gaming market is absolutely gargantuan - at least 100 million active users.

HD6770M is slower than HD5100 from 13 inch Macbook Pro. Iris Pro from last gen 15 inch MBP is only 5% slower than GT750M from higher end MBP.

About Vulkan we already have said enough that its a game changer for whole gaming industry and changes a bit in computing what so ever.

Competitive gaming is minority, and secondly, competitive gaming is not defined by computer you have. Sure, you can benefit from better Computer with less latency, higher framerate, but there are gamers that are willing to sacrifice graphical scale of game to just get enough framerate and that can be done on any computer in the world.

Third thing. Over 80% of ENTIRE gaming market are GPUs that cost up to 199% or are integrated. Enthusiast gaming is a nieche. Ive wrote about it before in this thread.

Apple does not have to care about gaming. Its not their job to do so. They have to bring as capable as possible computers that tick every single box in their core values list.

And power efficiency is one of the first things on it. Does it mean that Apple will never make powerful computer for gaming? No. Mac Pro is that type of a machine, however it brings really big price premium. Not me to judge it.

leman · Apr 3, 2015

Ishayu said:
Competitive gamers are an absolute minority?! Just what planet are you living on? xD The PC gaming market is absolutely gargantuan - at least 100 million active users.

Please! How many of those 100 million are competitive gamers? Look at games like WoW, around 10M subscribers but only few thousand of truly competitive players (if at all).

Ishayu said:
World of Warcraft, specifically, could benefit from Direct State Access and DirectX 11 emulation features for easy porting of their new Windows rendering stack - the lack of which is currently locking out a large portion of the high-end graphics features on Mac OS X.

And that's just the OpenGL4.4 features.

I believe you wanted to write GL4.5, but anyway.

I absolutely agree that DSA is a great thing for OpenGL and ARB_clip_control is neat as well, however, I wouldn't really see these things as essential when porting a D3D renderer. In particular, DSA is not much more than syntactic sugar. For porting, it doesn't make any substantial difference. I was asking about specific GL4.1+ functionality that would be essential for games, like sparse textures or image load/store functionality.

Ishayu said:
Swap interval is controlled by platform specific extensions. The Mac OS X one does as I have described.

I am not aware of any extensions that allow OpenGL to skip frames (unless you refer to adaptive sync stuff, which also does not skip frames). Of course, it might be something I have missed. I haven't been following GL too closely in the last few years since I quit moderating the OpenGL forums. At any rate, I would be gad if you could refer me to the extensions you are speaking about, I would like to stay updated

BTW, OS X offers some very good tools for sync control. In particular, it has API that provides you with exact timings for screen refresh events. This allows you to have very fine-grained control over your rendering and animations. I believe Nvidia now actively pushes similar functionality to Windows calling it 'G-sync'.

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Ishayu said:
Razer Blade is as thin as a rMBP and has far more graphics horsepower and a similar size screen. The battery is also about the same. And that's just one example off the top of my head. It's also cheaper.

70Wh is not 'about the same' as 95Wh. Look, the Blade is an amazing computer and a truly technological marvel. I am actually quite tempted to buy one for gaming myself (if you could buy it in Europe). However, its quite clear how they reach those performance levels. Just look at the teardown and you will see that battery is visibly compared to the MBP. No wonder they can pack a bigger cooling system. Its the question of priorities. For Apple, battery life is more important.

Exhale · Apr 3, 2015

leman said:
I believe Nvidia now actively pushes similar functionality to Windows calling it 'G-sync'.

Er, no. G-sync is functionality for controlling when the Display Panel should perform its redraw. Specifically, it means that the display panel only performs its redraw when it gets a new image frame. Rather than only drawing at specific locked intervals. (Commonly 60z)
That is a display hardware tech.

Its not an API for getting information when a display refresh event occurs. Thats just plain V-Sync.

Theres a massive difference between the two.

OS X Metal for OS X?

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