How reliable is it? Are you able to do system updates normally, stuff like that? I keep being tempted by the potential specs and cost/value ratio of going the Hackintosh route, but I wouldn't want to do it if maintaining it became a hobby...
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Another Mac port gets cancelled due to Apple's poor graphics support
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You can do system updates, although the yearly big updates can be a pain. iMessage works, but it is also a pain to get working.
I had a hackintosh for about six years but
it just wasn't worth the maintenance for me, because I just need the power for games, which Windows plays better anyway. For me, a gaming PC + MBP is the best of both worlds.
They haven't done that at all. They bought MonoDevelop, rebranded it Xamarin, then recently rebranded it again as "Visual Studio" when it's really still just MonoDevelop. It's definitely not a port of Visual Studio. In any case games are generally written in C++, so Obj-C or Swift isn't relevant.
--Eric
yes is very reliable and i'm able to update without any problem, but you have to build something that is truly compatible to avoid problems. i have 64 gigs ram ddr4, water cooler , x2 nvidia card, rocket raid card, etc etc etc, hitting over 4,000 mbps with my 8 ssds in raid0. i also use iram disk to create a ram disk, in resume the whole thing is pretty damn fast and stable. is also nice looking with the clear side panel.
Granted, I have not written very large programs, and I am by no means a great programmer, but Swift performance has been great as far as I can tell. Medium compile time, but super speedy runtime, compared to the same code written in Obj-C. Now granted, I may just be writing Obj-C inefficiently.
It doesn't have most of the features necessary for most creatives need their professional apps need to get the most performance from the high cost of hardware and they need to have have that available in professional applications that aren't necessarily always going to be first party Apple software.
Every part of the 3D development pipeline takes a performance hit, video editing outside of FCP takes a hit. Photoshop takes a hit in certain areas. In general it's just not anywhere near as optimal as it could or should be for the cost of the desktop hardware and the performance of the Mac Books and iMacs. All this is coming from someone that's been primarily an OS X user in the creative space since late 1998.
If Apple were to support open graphics standards on the Mac Pro and facilitate support of eGPU expansion there would be no complaints because performance would be top of class.
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MS always realized the importance of OpenGL as an open standard and didn't move to block it or wall it's hardware off from it. From my perspective I don't care if Apple wants to have Metal but they should always facilitate having up to date open standards APIs as well. Them even porting Metal to OS X was puzzling considering how many years passed where they were dragging their asses on keeping OpenGL up to date with no alternative. I would even argue that had Apple spent the R&D augmenting OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan they could have gotten all the same performance gains for their OS/first party applications and still been able to take advantage of the broad development support for open standards.
If Apple doesn't want to be directly involved in the development they could rejoin the Khronos group board and off-load actual development of all the standards OpenGL, OpenGL ES (mobile), OpenCL to the Molten group as sub contractors and offer Metal integration support.
I think you've identified two issues here.
Firstly, what features does Metal lack which creative professionals need? I am one, and use both Macs and PCs and never feel constrained using one over the other. Performance differences between Premier and FCPX seem more to do with how each editor operates, and both synthetic benchmarks and my own real-world usage shows pretty similar performance between Premier on Mac and Windows on similar hardware.
Saying that performance is not optimal considering the cost, however, I would think is more related to the hardware specifically. Apple have never really been on the bleeding edge of hardware, despite their high prices.
I agree that performance is not where it should be considering the cost of hardware, however I don't think this is anything to do with Metal. Everything I've seen regarding Metal of late leads me to believe Apple are pushing to make it equal to other APIs, though it's obviously not there yet. It was only announced for Mac a little over 18 months ago.
Beyond that, adding a new renderer to a properly designed and abstracted software package is not really a huge task. Obviously the bug testing takes time, but there's not really any reason more creative apps can't be supporting it going into the future.
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Actual developers seem to like Metal and have some issues with DX12 by comparison. Clearly Metal isn't 100% ready considering the delayed port of Deus Ex, though. However it doesn't seem rational to claim it "sucks".
--Eric
--Eric
The two main game engines (Unity, Unreal) have adopted it.
--Eric
--Eric
On paper, yes. But did the Metal bring any improvements on the Mac gaming stage ? Has the gap with PCs started to close ? Mac gaming is at no better state than it was 3 years ago.
I don't even think that apple brought Metal to mac in order to improve mac gaming, rather than having a unified, and totally controlled ecosystem.
I don't even think that apple brought Metal to mac in order to improve mac gaming, rather than having a unified, and totally controlled ecosystem.
And yet, there is still not a single game openly available running on these engines that uses Metal.
Even aside from that, you can still count all the games Metal (in release versions) on the fingers of a single hand.
Sorry, but there's a flaw in your argument. First off, the tweet you refer to already has explanations in the replies - DX11 is high level code, and there's been a hell of a lot of optimisation underneath. DX12 leaves more responsibilities with the developer and other parties have less ability, and have had less time, to optimise for it. Same issue applies to Metal, albeit Apple's MetalKit is a somewhat well optimised high-level variant of Metal. You've gotta remember that DX developers are coming from DX11 and Mac developers are coming from OpenGL, and when it comes to games, DX11 has had a heck of a lot more optimisation work behind it, both from GPU manufacturer, driver developers, and game developers.
I've spoken with Aspyr directly about this, and I'd like to let you guys in on our correspondence. I'll attach photos of the emails
Attachments
You know this isn't true. You made this claim over at IMG. Why are you repeating it here?
On a side note, OpenGL was just depreciated on macOS for the latest version of UE4.
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The email you quoted is referring to OpenGL.
10.12.2 apparently has a lot of metal bug fixes/optimisations that Feral requires for their games. Blizzard posted a note about that also.
The email does talk about OpenGL, yes, but it also talks about Metal. There's a bit about why they don't use Metal instead of OpenGL for the ports.
Nope; I don't think you understood what I was saying. Here's another post by the same developer with more details.
The post I linked to is written by someone who's primarily a D3D developer. Note that the process for Metal-ifying Unity was to take the DX11 code as a base.
Anyway, I wouldn't expect Metal games to be common at this point. For one thing it means dropping support for all but the very latest versions of macOS. It's pretty obvious that it's the way things are going though.
--Eric
I'm personally frustrated that all the long hours crunching away on Mac Metal support in UE4 hasn't yet seen a release in a full, final game release. However, for Fortnite & UT it is much too simplistic to suggest that Metal is the sole reason for this and that consequently "Metal sucks" - games are *huge* projects and so there's plenty of different elements to align before you can release. Other developers mileage will vary of course - I can't speak for them.
To be clear Metal is much more of an equivalent to D3D12 or Vulkan - there are no UE4 games using Vulkan on Windows/Linux yet and very few using D3D12. Despite being a Khronos member our Vulkan support in UE4 is a long way behind our Metal support simply because the Metal API was finalised to develop against long before. Bringing a new API into an engine like UE4 and actually shipping a game on it is much harder than it looks and game development projects are measured in years, not weeks and months. There's an inherent lag between starting on API support and seeing it ship in a final game - it's a frustrating reality of modern games development.
UE4 4.14 deprecated Mac OpenGL with prejudice and for 4.15 we've entirely disabled Mac OpenGL: Metal will be the only option. For 4.16 we'll go in and remove all the remnants of Mac OpenGL support from the code. Despite some limitations, that are slowly being lifted as Apple updates it with each major OS, Metal is already better than what we had with Mac OpenGL and is moving beyond what we could have achieved if OpenGL 4.3+ had appeared on the Mac.
None of this is to suggest that Metal is perfect, no API is, or that there are no bugs to be fixed, because of course there are. That's an eternal, inevitable part of software development. Us games developers just have to keep plugging away at it with Apple - I trust that folks at Aspyr and Feral will do just that and their games will appear as and when they are ready, as will ours. The situation is neither as desperate as some suggest or as optimistic as other hope. The transition has been rougher than I expected but I've personally been here before and it will improve.
Interesting reads, both of you. I've just been sceptical about Metal from the start, since A) It originated with Imagination GPUs in mind, and they're pretty different from GCN or Pascal/other-Nvidia. And 2) Apple seemingly stopped caring about other APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan, meaning Cross-Platform API usage would basically go out the window, a benefit to using OpenGL. Furthermore, when I received the mail I attached to a previous post from Aspyr, that their tests with Metal had revealed no real improvements from OpenGL 4.1 since Metal was in their words, lacking features, well, I lost a lot of hope for the state of graphics on the Mac. By the sound of what you two have written/linked to, there's still reason to be optimistic about the future of graphics on the Mac though.
BTW. Since UE4 has Mac support, how come we so rarely see Mac versions of UE games, and when we do, they usually still go through someone like Feral? How come the original developers so rarely release Mac versions themselves?
Yeah, that's what I do these days. Apple's obsession with thinness does not correlate well with powerful GPUs. Silence isn't a problem: Aside from the almost inaudible fans on the water cooler I have on my CPU, the other fans normally don't even run most of the time, and hardly make any noise when they do.
Because it's true. Go ahead, find me a single currently available game running on either Unity or the UE4 that actually uses Metal. No beta versions, no internal testing, but in an actual release version. But don't expect me to wait with bated breath.
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I can't name many, but WoW has a Metal renderer on the Mac.
http://www.cio.com/article/3098437/...rld-of-warcraft-running-at-5k-resolution.html
The article is old, so there it's pre-production, but it has been released by now.
Also it's not about Unity/Unreal Metal games right now, it's the fact that they are capable of it. It's a fairly new feature, so as more games get completed and as more people move to later versions of the OS, it will become more common.
As for performance, Metal won't help much with games that are purely GPU bound. Some games will benefit more than others.
--Eric
As for performance, Metal won't help much with games that are purely GPU bound. Some games will benefit more than others.
--Eric
WoW was already included in the number of Metal supporting games you can count "on the fingers of a single hand" I mentioned. The other two are Headlander and Refunct (see below).
…which I knew about (see above), but I wasn't aware they are using the UE4. Okay, point taken. But still: that precisely one single game (and a fairly obscure one nonetheless). This hardly equates to an impressive adoption rate. Unless you have other examples, of course…
Well, fact is also that several developers are sitting on Metal versions of their Unity/UE4 games, waiting for bug fixes by Apple and possibly the Second Coming of Christ (whichever might come first), with Obduction (UE4) and Firewatch (Unity) probably being the most prominent examples. So just having the engines capable of using Metal is apparently not sufficient.
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