OS X METAL! Mantle/DX12 analog for Mac?

lewdvig said:

Sounds like Metal is going to make it much easier for devs to get close to hardware and reduce overhead. Pretty exciting! This is my number one beef with OS X as a gaming platform.

No reason this does't get posted to OS X IMO. Why not?

What do you guys think?

Having Unity, Epic and Crytek on board is great. Those are all super cross platform devs.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/2/5773128/metal-ios-gaming-wwdc

Click to expand...

Current info points to it being A7 only so iOS only also.

Only few months ago all main GPU companies were talking up how they could cut all the overhead and speed existing OGL up by 10X etc. back in GDC '14. So not sure what the benefit of closing off other vendors behind another wall can do especially if they can already improve current OGL with low end access and get the boosts they say are available already in OGL.

A7 is not coming to Macs any time soon (despite some rumours of them having it run with Macbooks) so I don't see how this can do any but deflect efforts and attention from OpenGL and OS X.

Guess we need to see if they have added OGL 4.4 support into 10.10 will give some indication as to future intentions.

For the future a leaner language in Swift is probably a good thing. Chopping up the graphics API market is only a bad thing IMO (Mantle, Metal, Nvidia own thing, OGL)

Slightly of topic: Does anyone remember that eons ago there was a graphics API with the brand name Metal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics#Market_trends

The integrated modern style 3D feature produced by S3, was the Savage series of graphics cards. Notably these pioneered S3TC under the proprietary METAL API, subsequently adopted by Microsoft under royalty, as an industry standard for texture compression in DirectX.​

Well, if I still remember this correctly, that was about 20 years ago.


Back to topic: Competition is good thing to drive performance in any field of business or technology. But you have to be on the lookout that you don't suffer from too many vendor specific implementations. There was a reason the industry moved from a multitude of 3D-APIs towards OpenGL and DirectX. So let's hope that Apple's Metal wakes some people at Google's Android team and that they then are smart enough to push OpenGL|ES forward (and don't create a third competing API specific to Android).

Well, time will tell.

lewdvig said:

Sounds like Metal is going to make it much easier for devs to get close to hardware and reduce overhead. Pretty exciting! This is my number one beef with OS X as a gaming platform.

No reason this does't get posted to OS X IMO. Why not?

What do you guys think?

Having Unity, Epic and Crytek on board is great. Those are all super cross platform devs.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/2/5773128/metal-ios-gaming-wwdc

Click to expand...

Not OS X. You would be working with a moving target and 3rd party GPGPU vendors.

AMD Mantle targets GCN 1.x+ cards, but only on Windows, not OS X, Linux or FreeBSD, etc.

Apple is better off optimizing and solidifying full OpenGL 4.4 support, system-wide before proposing any new CORE APIs for OpenGL 5.x that are closer to the metal.

By then, AMD will have their GCN 2.0 based GPGPUs arriving, and Nvidia a new revision as well. Intel IGP will be new also.

AMD and Nvidia are OpenGL 4.4 supported.

If AMD coordinated with Apple to provide an I/O Kit Device Driver Family fully tested that is OpenGL 4.4 and OpenCL 2.0 optimized they will have to work on various levels of OpenGL support for Intel and older support for OpenCL 1.x.

Metal for A7 based SoC and newer gives Apple complete control/autonomy over the complete product.

Apple could somehow have designed Metal as a future Open standard ala OpenCL.

Hope they do something that is cross-platform compliant like OpenCL. [Even OpenCL is variable in compliancy; and experiences the same issues that OpenGL is experiencing with not all systems current on OpenGL 4.4--including OS X].

Moonraker said:

Current info points to it being A7 only so iOS only also.

Only few months ago all main GPU companies were talking up how they could cut all the overhead and speed existing OGL up by 10X etc. back in GDC '14. So not sure what the benefit of closing off other vendors behind another wall can do especially if they can already improve current OGL with low end access and get the boosts they say are available already in OGL.

A7 is not coming to Macs any time soon (despite some rumours of them having it run with Macbooks) so I don't see how this can do any but deflect efforts and attention from OpenGL and OS X.

Guess we need to see if they have added OGL 4.4 support into 10.10 will give some indication as to future intentions.

For the future a leaner language in Swift is probably a good thing. Chopping up the graphics API market is only a bad thing IMO (Mantle, Metal, Nvidia own thing, OGL)

Click to expand...

Yeah, IMO the last thing we need is another API. Fix OpenGL if there are issues.

I thought the same thing about Mantel, and DirectX 12 was pretty much doing all that in DirectX, which makes much more sense. I'd much rather see Apple do the equivalent in OpenGL.

Also I thought it weird how the article talks about things not taking advantage of the A7 chip...IMO that would have nothing to do with the API, but almost entirely have to do with it making more sense financially to target as many devices as possible. Most stuff (all stuff?) targets Apple's 2011 era dual core A9 + dual SGX 543 (if not also their gen before that A8 platform). Devices which are STILL being sold by Apple.