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OS X Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Metal!
- Thread starter imacken
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Hi everyone. We originally announced that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided would be coming to Mac by the end of the year, because that is when we thought it would be ready. We really appreciate everyone being patient with us about that, as we wanted to get it out sooner!
Metal is a young API and is still evolving. We are indeed waiting for further updates to it, but we can’t say when those updates will be made. As with any of our games, we won’t release Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Mac until we’re confident that it performs well.
As soon as we have news on a release date we’ll update our website and social media, so do keep an eye out and once again, thanks for your patience!
Metal is a young API and is still evolving. We are indeed waiting for further updates to it, but we can’t say when those updates will be made. As with any of our games, we won’t release Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Mac until we’re confident that it performs well.
As soon as we have news on a release date we’ll update our website and social media, so do keep an eye out and once again, thanks for your patience!
I've given up waiting and am playing the game on Bootcamp. A shame, but there really is a limit to how long we can wait for updates and news on planned releases.
I am very loyal to Feral and others and buy a lot of their games, but there comes a point when we are getting no news, and releases are not announced or get delayed indefinitely (Deus Ex) or get cancelled just before release (F1 2015), that I have to give up and buy the Windows version. I wish it was another way!
The game is excellent, BTW, but I guess you already know that!
I am very loyal to Feral and others and buy a lot of their games, but there comes a point when we are getting no news, and releases are not announced or get delayed indefinitely (Deus Ex) or get cancelled just before release (F1 2015), that I have to give up and buy the Windows version. I wish it was another way!
The game is excellent, BTW, but I guess you already know that!
We are doing a native Mac port of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided using Metal, and it's going to be great. Maybe you could get it for a friend when it's released... it is an excellent game, after all
Do keep in mind that F1 2015 was never announced for Mac, let alone cancelled! But if you're a big racing fan, we're happy to consider your request for a new F1 game on Mac.
EDIT: Just to clarify, we didn't make any official announcements about F1 2015 coming to Mac. We have a lot of racing game fans so when it came out for Linux and not Mac, people were understandably curious. If they asked us whether they'd be able to play it on Mac, we were honest and explained that it would only be available on Linux. So hopefully that clears up something! ... and now back to Deus Ex chat
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Entirely unrelated comment, but I'd just like to say that I think it is incredibly awesome how you guys actually reach out and talk to the community. You get a massive thumbs up. I love the work you do.
Seconded. Having staff frequent third party forums is nothing short of amazing. Good work!
No probs! It's what I'm here for
I'm reading these posts about metal and vulkan..im new to gaming on a mac, can someone explain to me what metal and vulcan are?
Metal is a growing API by Apple, which game developers can use to bring games to Mac and iOS. Vulkan is another relatively new API, but it is used for games on Windows and Linux.
If you come from Windows, you'll probably be more familiar with DirectX. These are counterparts to that basically. Metal is Apple, and Vulkan is open. All are programming interfaces for making computer graphics.
Yeah, but it's about getting the technologies adopted. If it's in the OS; it's there for everyone, it'll be known by everyone and easily accessible to developers. Third party solutions aren't. Besides, how is it implemented? Because if it's just translating Vulkan calls into Metal or whatnot, then it brings no advantage anyhow.
They're graphics APIs/frameworks used (primarily) to develop games. Others include Direct3D (Windows-only) and OpenGL (pretty much every platform). They also are compute APIs - using your machine's GPU to accelerate non-gaming maths functions.
Whereas Direct3D and OpenGL focus on a wide feature set, support for a wide range of hardware, and portability; Metal and Vulkan are lower level, with reduced performance overhead and so improved performance and/or reduced power requirements and heat generation.
Metal is Apple's graphics API for iOS, now also available in macOS. It doesn't mean you can take an iOS Metal game and run it on macOS, but it does make it far easier for games developers to develop for both. *As long as they don't plan on porting the game to Window/Android/Linux*
Vulkan is a similar low-level API for Windows, Android and Linux; based of AMD's Mantle (two low-level graphics APIs "Metal" and "Mantle"? Confused.com!). While Metal is limited to Apple platforms, Vulkan is targeted at multiple platforms, as the 'spiritual successor' to OpenGL. Though given that Metal is built into iOS and macOS, it's likely to stay the dominant API there. MoltenVK is a 3rd party Vulkan implementation for both platforms, build on Metal.
To be realistic, it's likely that you'd be using a game engine anyway, so it's not as big of a deal as it might seem. It's more likely to be something for engine developers to take care of rather than individual game developers.
--Eric
Well, I wouldn't say that. First off, even if you do use middleware, like Unity or Unreal Engine, you still need to do work to adapt a title to another platform. Second, you might also need to write shaders in the engine, using the relevant APIs. And third, not that many titles use an off the shelf middleware engine that it eliminates the need to consider the rest of the market. I'd honestly only put it at around 65-70% of the market.
It's very possible to write games that require little or no actual work in the engine to adapt, at least with similar platforms (e.g. PC/Mac/Linux). Packaging things up for distribution requires some work, but in any case that's completely unrelated to the graphics API, which is what we're discussing here.
At least with Unity that's generally not true (not familiar enough with UE4 to comment on that). Writing shaders is API-agnostic; the shaders are auto-compiled to Metal/OpenGL/Direct3D/etc. as needed. For certain specialized/advanced things you do need to take platform differences into account, but that's not too common.
Regardless of the percentage, lots of developers do use an off-the-shelf engine, so I'm just going to stick with "not as big of a deal as it might seem", since that's accurate. Also I would expect the trend toward using third-party engines to continue, as the move to "closer to the metal" APIs seems like it would encourage more people to want to leave that stuff up to engine programmers.
--Eric
The following relates to your entire post and not just the above:
Fair enough, all good and valid points. You're right.
Metal is definitely faster than Open GL in my World of Warcraft tests but still about 10-15 frames slower than Windows 10 using boot camp.
There's also the fact that Metal is new and requires new coding schemes for optimal performance, which are not yet implemented. There is more room for progression with Metal than with DX11.
That's great news! Any idea how much of a difference it made in SC2?
I can't say anything about SC2, but in HoS, the Metal renderer is labeled as "beta" – and obviously for a reason: on my 2016 15" rMBP with the AMD 460, the game keeps stut-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-tering, completely independent of the settings. There are also a few visible glitches. Between the stutters, it seems to run minimally smoother than the default OpenGL 2.1 renderer, but without means to display any actual metrics, it's hard to say.
Needs more work.
At least the number of available games with official Metal support has effectively almost doubled with that…
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