Out of curiosity: have you also made some DX11 benchmarks under Windows? DX12 is apparently still not consistently faster.
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OS X Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Metal!
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Is that actually a regression though? MSAA support in Metal is one of the less tested areas of the stack and I’ve seen it be far slower than D3D. This is one of the features where hiding the details in the driver actually helps as the GPU vendors have all sorts of hardware tricks to make MSAA more efficient - they aren’t as easily expressed in Metal.
Yes, but if you are GPU bound then that isn’t much help. Metal is not as GPU efficient as D3D - especially in terms of shader code generation and MSAA mentioned above.
Don't know about the optical cable and that, but using Display Port it's been pretty much plug and play, with speaker configuration in System Preferences.
I'd assume you could also pass the AC3 signal from the optical port to a reciever or something? The software needs to send the AC3 signal though, and not handle it internally.
It is indeed far slower than D3D under 10.3.1, but it's even worse under 10.3.2. It suppose this kind of optimisation is the responsibility of GPU vendors rather than Apple?
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Strangely, the difference in performance between OSes in Hitman decreases as resolution increases, to become non-existent at 4K. So for that title, Metal appears to be more GPU-efficient than it is CPU-efficient.
Yeah I’d expect MSAA performance and correctness to be on the GPU vendors.
Your Hitman performance numbers suggest that it converges on the same bottleneck as resolution increases, but at lower resolutions Metal is clearly more GPU constrained than D3D. There’s so many different paths through a modern GPU that getting the optimal shader code and GPU behaviour is hard and is why even DX12 is sometimes slower than DX11 where this work has been done.
I thought the test results of Deus Ex on Windows would be saved to disk, like they are on macOS, but apparently they are not. 
Strange. So I can't post precise ratios, but form the numbers I do remember, Metal is ~85-87% as fast as DX11 on my Mac. This is consistent across resolutions, at medium or high settings. I tested with recent crimson drivers on Windows 10 fall creator.
Another awesome port by Feral. Business as usual.
Strange. So I can't post precise ratios, but form the numbers I do remember, Metal is ~85-87% as fast as DX11 on my Mac. This is consistent across resolutions, at medium or high settings. I tested with recent crimson drivers on Windows 10 fall creator.Another awesome port by Feral. Business as usual.
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As I said, I am using Sound Blaster Omni now to receiver, but you will not get 5.1 sound in games on Mac as there is no decoder like Dolby Live on Windows.
The only way you’ll hear 5.1 on Mac is when you play a DVD.
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I know we have different iMacs, but as seen from results in F1 2017, Dirt Rally, Hitman and DEMD, my results are more like 70-75% across all res.I thought the test results of Deus Ex on Windows would be saved to disk, like they are on macOS, but apparently they are not.
Another awesome port by Feral. Business as usual.
That probably means drivers for the Polaris GPUs (or at leas the radeon 580) work better than the M395X drivers with these Metal games. Or that Polaris DX11 drivers work less well, but this is unlikely to me.
Interestingly, Feral games use OpenGL for the "frame swap" on certain Macs to avoid juddering issues that still affect Metal.
So on High Sierra, a Feral game would use Metal for rendering, OpenGL for the frame swap, and then Metal would be used by the Window server for the display.
I wonder how much this workaround affects performance.But conveniently, this allows disabling V-Sync.
Because with low level APIs, the low level optimization responsibility shifts from the driver developers to the application developers.
Interesting. Unfortunately, I always get screen tearing on Mac when I disable v-sync. In contrast to Windows when I can get over 100fps in DCS, for example, without any issue at all.That probably means drivers for the Polaris GPUs (or at leas the radeon 580) work better than the M395X drivers with these Metal games. Or that Polaris DX11 drivers work less well, but this is unlikely to me.
Interestingly, Feral games use OpenGL for the "frame swap" on certain Macs to avoid juddering issues that still affect Metal.
So on High Sierra, a Feral game would use Metal for rendering, OpenGL for the frame swap, and then Metal would be used by the Window server for the display.
But conveniently, this allows disabling V-Sync.
I know what you mean, but it doesn’t always seem to be the case in Windows. Obviously it is off when getting 100+ FPS on a 60Hz monitor.
Some frames may be rendered but never displayed, depending on the type of V-Sync used (triple buffering). I believe some fps counters can still record these frames. This is the case for (full) Metal games, which can generate up to 120 fps even though frame swapping is synced with refresh rate.
What exactly is the purpose of such a decoder then, if you can clearly get 5.1, either with DVDs or apps like Final Cut Pro X?
Dolby’s compression format requires a decoder and Dolby charge a license fee per application that uses it. Apple paid that fee for their DVD Player and other specific apps that required it.
Most games actually output 5.1 uncompressed audio, so you need a USB sound card and a speaker setup plugged in the old fashioned way. I don’t know about DXMD specifically though.
Ok, so I was completely wrong about this. All the advice I’d been given in the past was wrong.
Some of what was said here made me think, so rather than use an optical cable, I connected speakers from the sound card to direct input on my receiver, and, everything worked perfectly!
Surround sound in DEMD and other games - at last after all these years.
Now, if only Eagle Dynamics would release DCS for Mac, I might never have to go to Boot amp again!
If it is triple buffered you would need to be going 180fps to see tearing. OpenGL on Mac is double buffered.
If you use an optical cable then the game's uncompressed 5.1 audio has to be compressed into Dolby's format as a single optical cable only carries stereo uncompressed. That's another license fee to Dolby and a performance hit in-game if done in software
I thought it depended on the GPU vendor. I've consistently seen my nVidia GPUs generate either 60fps or 30fps with nothing in between in V-Synced games, while my radeon cards can generate any stable framerate from 30 to 60.
If you use an optical cable then the game's uncompressed 5.1 audio has to be compressed into Dolby's format as a single optical cable only carries stereo uncompressed. That's another license fee to Dolby and a performance hit in-game if done in software
I may be a bit late... like one year late, but SoundPusher works for that (In high Sierra) :
- It adds a 6 channels virtual audio output
- Encode the 6 channels
- And send it through the optical connector
Releases are here : https://github.com/q-p/SoundPusher/releases
Clever stuff, thanks for pointing it out. That's exactly what you need if you desire 5.1 audio from a game using an optical cable.
Just tried this, and although it seems potentially great, I am getting short sound cut outs when playing Deus Ex:MD every few seconds. HS 10.13.2.
Is that normal?
I don't think so.
I just tried with this particular game (I played it under Bootcamp before, because its performances in Mac OS are abysmal on my system) : I didn't notice any hiccup.
It may depend on :
- The decoder : Most of the time, I'm using a 5.1 Sharkoon headphone. Other decoders may be less forgiving on bugs / small errors in the encoded data.
- The computer : If the CPU is 100% loaded the 5.1 encoding may suffer ; Although that'll be strange, because your computer has more CPU power than mine and encoding is eating roughly 8% CPU time.
I have no problem with this (or any other) game in bootcamp either. Nor do I have any issue with surround sound on Mac with direct speaker connection. This is purely limited to the SoundPusher app and optical connection. I also have no issues with stereo/DPL through the optical connection with our SoundPusher.
Purely relating to SoundPusher and Deus Ex MD. No problem with the test you linked to or playing music in iTunes.
I'll try another game and see if it happens there.