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Another Mac port gets cancelled due to Apple's poor graphics support
- Thread starter Cougarcat
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iamtheonlyone4ever
Suspended
ha ha i knew somebody was going to bring this up, but mac pro have pic-e slots right, so i can't install a video card even if the mac pro has 16x pic-e slot, the card has web drivers that are compatible with OS X, so what i’m suppose to do with the extra pci-e slot, don’t i have the right to upgrade my hardware, but macs don’t bring those cards, by the time apple decide to put a 980 in their macs is already 2020, so i have to wait till 2020, but like you said they are not made or desing for OS X right, but what about this then
http://www.evga.com/articles/00730/
i don’t know it seems to me that they are design for OS X and they are compatible
i know this a 680 not a 980
but someone with a real mac pro “not a hack” can run the benchmark in OS X
then run the benchmark in windows from bootcamp
and let’s compare the results
and this card is design for OS X
i love apple but there is really no excuse.
and this does not apply only to games but for over all video processing, encoding, etc
many people are upset about the old drivers because it hurt graphic performance
and the sad part is the apple knows about it
let’s just hope for an update in 10.12 a boost at least
i’m not going to write any more about this, i don’t want to upset people
and i think i said pretty much everything i wanted to say
yes i will still read
waiting for a miracle in 10.12
also you don't need an nvidia card or a mac pro
anybody with a mac with intel graphics and with windows installed in a bootcamp partition can run the benchmark test
and see the difference between both system
run unigine valley and cinebench and enlighten me
can't say that your integrated graphics card is unsupported in OS X
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Nvidia actually does a fantastic job with their Web Drivers, especially for something with an essentially nonexistent userbase. They are very prompt with putting out updates for OS X releases. I hope they continue them with 1070/80 support for 10.12.
I don't know what issues are being referred to here. My 970 has worked great with them, except for an Alien Isolation crash bug that admittedly took a few months to resolve.
in that they don't want to code to run on a potato...yes. Some game companies probably not gung ho to port when end of day most things that would make that game pretty have to be turned off. AA, shading, textures all bumped down if not turned off. So end product is now visually less stunning. This to some is an art form. While not a traditional painters canvas...it can be an art form all the same. At some point some are going you know....why bother as it gets watered down. I cannot fault them for that.
Feral is more aware of this than many game companies as its their thing and they have been good to us port wise. Watch streams of PC client of Xcom2...then run mac client. I am thankful for feral giving us xcom 2 on mac os. Anything lacking in it I know is you can only do so much to get it running on mac os. I take my xcom2 client, set if for potato mode and say at least I have it. This caveat gets old though.
I get graphics stutter in diablo 3 running a rmbp mid 15. Game made in 2012, not massively overhauled in RoS expansion when released graphically. A 2012 game that can show limits on 2015 (or even 2014 assuming a year on the gantt chart in testing and development) hardware I find disconcerting. In my mind I shouldn't have to bump down settings on a game that predates the hardware by 2-3 years.
I'd rather have feral/others say if we water this down too much its going to be borderline appearance of cash money grab...and we and you the game player would probably not like that. I prefer that upfront honesty really. Vice cash money grab they are mac users so will eat it up anyway.
MacAlien
macrumors 6502a
D3 is a whole different beast. It wasn't very well optimized, nor was RoS which did have a bit of a overhaul. I don't know many Mac users who've not had issues running that game well. Also doesn't help when their Mac support is teeny tiny vs. WoW. They've tried fixing some of their bugs but it's still a fairly poorly executed client. I actually stopped even trying to log into that game when it was taking a few minutes to crash out and just as long to log in.... Think somebody once found it was a bad memory leak, but after over a year it hasn't improved much.
Janichsan
macrumors 68040
It has been said before but definitely needs to be repeated: this has nothing to do with Macs being a "potato". The hardware might not be ultra top high end, but it's more than adequate.
Take your Mac, install Bootcamp, and run XCOM 2 and/or Diablo 3 there. Both will run and look significantly better – on the very same hardware.
This is for the most part a pure software problem, in that way that the operating system's graphics capabilities are severely underdeveloped.
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Those would be more relevant tests indeed, but I don't have windows installed. It is better to compare performance on officially supported GPUs, with software that is written in openGL from the start, like Unigine.
If you use Tom Raider for instance, the negative effect of porting from DirectX also contribute to the results.
Cinebench is unreliable. It has always shown inconsistent results, with sometimes iGPUs beating dedicated graphics cards.
I don't dispute that OS X openGL drivers are poor. But to show that, you have to use supported GPUs.
The Barefeats tests ran at very low resolution, which magnifies difference in driver overhead. The difference between OSs really shows in these conditions. In more "normal" conditions, it's not that big. The GPU code generated by OS X driver is acceptable, so performance between OSes is comparable at very high resolution, when GPU performance is the limiting factor. When the CPU is limiting, OS X can be far behind. This is where Metal really helps.
Nightarchaon
macrumors 65816
If you want to game, you need a PC, or console. With apple push to "smaller, thinner, lighter, integrated, portless" your going to get a worse and worse bang for your buck with an apple system as each generation is released.
I still see a high probability of apple looking at moving to Apple CPUs in the laptops and a version of iOS for "desktop" as they phase out intel completely.
TBH apples move to a consumer "throwaway" design ethic has worked for them, but has also alieniated those of us who like to be able to replace HDDs, upgrade memory, or replace failed batteries, simple little things that add to the lifespan of a laptop or desktop, but cut into apples bottom line where it wants to charge you 1000x the price for RAM, and wants to make sure your buying a new system every 2-3 years to keep the money rolling in.
I went back to a hulking great PC in 2013.. for gaming... my 2011 iMac and 2008 MacBooK Pro (early 2008) are still go strong, both with many "upgrades" i did myself.. and both, were far better at the time for gaming, than the current crop of macs are today.
I still see a high probability of apple looking at moving to Apple CPUs in the laptops and a version of iOS for "desktop" as they phase out intel completely.
TBH apples move to a consumer "throwaway" design ethic has worked for them, but has also alieniated those of us who like to be able to replace HDDs, upgrade memory, or replace failed batteries, simple little things that add to the lifespan of a laptop or desktop, but cut into apples bottom line where it wants to charge you 1000x the price for RAM, and wants to make sure your buying a new system every 2-3 years to keep the money rolling in.
I went back to a hulking great PC in 2013.. for gaming... my 2011 iMac and 2008 MacBooK Pro (early 2008) are still go strong, both with many "upgrades" i did myself.. and both, were far better at the time for gaming, than the current crop of macs are today.
You know, you can still buy a Mac Pro tower from ebay and upgrade the parts that way.
whooleytoo
macrumors 604
Not sure what "for the most part a pure" means..😉
I think it's a lot of both. For instance, I now haven't booted into OSX on my 2013 iMac in almost a year. For the money I spent on it, I could have bought a decent gaming rig. More importantly, I could have bought an upgradable gaming rig that scales pretty well towards the high end by replacing the GPU, and possibly the CPU.
I'm not quibbling about my own decision, but it has meant that machine is now below the minimum specs for the game I'm playing (Elite Dangerous Horizons). The lack of dedicated virtual memory in particular is causing stutters and level-of-detail issues. Maybe I could have spent more for a higher end Mac model, but without an upgrade path the machine has nowhere near the same useful lifetime.
As you say though, the software is also a factor. Mac development of the game has virtually stalled (they are releasing 1.x versions still) since the Mac version of OpenGL doesn't support compute shaders. Apple are unlikely to upgrade OpenGL now that they have Metal in the mix. Frontier aren't likely to ever rewrite/refactor their Cobra engine to use Metal for the tiny Mac market. So, we're kind of left out in the cold.
I'd absolutely love a reasonably price, small, well-designed, upgradable Mac tower; but it doesn't exist. So if everyone is recommending avoiding the Mac OS, and the hardware is expensive, mid-end at best and non-upgradable, it's getting really hard to choose any Mac as an option.
Thing is the bootcamp not a cure all. 2014 and 2015 games still need to be set for what I call 8 bit mode to get some FPS back. I thought about FO4 in bootcamp for example. It works but not getting much out of it from what I have seen and read. I xbone my FO4 tbh.
Also an issue I have with bootcamp it is when this becomes the solution, the issue of mac support doesn't get addressed really. If metrics taken, OS' used weighs heavily. Why no strong mac love game publisher? Our numbers showed not many used the mac clients. Cut and dry really. How can they know we want more support when we say well it runs in bootcamp fine basically so used more. They only see X number of Windows clients in use...and a very small number of apple clients.
TBH in my experience the only place we catch breaks here is MMO's. Where all can at some point crank down the settings. I played eve for 7 years. Windows PC towers of doom, MBP (11 and 15)....on all I set eve for 8bit mode when I did massive fleet fights for pvp. I was in the blob a fair bit....crank down settings was SOP to avoid lag issues.
Eve like most MMO's follow a midline between graphic greatness and playability. they try to make it nice and pretty but....its not full bore depth and detail of like say FO4. reduces network load one reason. gets people on less ballsy hardware to play as well...so more subs potentially the other.
Catch 22 is...you have to like MMO's ofc.
Uhm, I'm pretty certain this is why the majority of gamers own Windows gaming systems or get a console.
iamtheonlyone4ever
Suspended
hi it’s me again, i know i said that i wasn’t going to write any more but the reason why i said that was because i thought i was writing a little too much and i didn’t want to annoy people
now i’m back because i made a new discovery and i think i figure out what’s the problem is, also another user reply to me, i was running benchmarks today in both OS X EC 11.5 and in windows 10 Pro X64 using unigine heaven and unigine valley.
i will start by saying that both of these benchmark tools don’t use DX12 nor Metal, so i ran both of them using the same settings on both system and of course using OpenGL, the reason why i have to run OpenGL in windows is so i can do a fair comparison with mac OS X, El Capitan has Metal but i think we need new benchmark tools to bench Metal in OS X.
ok in windows OpenGL is a little bit faster in AVG FPS also in MIN FPS but MAX FPS is about the same, but in MIN FPS windows double mac OS X at least on my “hack” system, in AVG FPS windows also is a little bit faster by a few frames, around 10 more frames, also the difference in frames depends on the preset, i was using ultimate HD, ok now with all that out of the way let’s move on.
after running DX benchmark that where the real difference is, DX is faster than both by a reasonable margin around 30 more FPS, so i think this where all the problem comes from, DX is Microsoft so when companies like feral very good company by the way i have many games from them almost all good ports come from feral, try to port a game from windows to mac, the game comes from DX and is port into OpenGL and right there is the drop in performance.
DX in Windows is around 30 FPS faster than Windows OpenGL and Windows OpenGL is around 10 FPS faster than OS X OpenGL then when you port we can assume it can drop even more, so the only way we can get good ports in OS X is, port from DX to Metal or from Vulcan to Metal or DX to Vulcan if apple decide to use Vulcan, also that link that i posted in my first post might be the solution, another important thing is that i use DX11 we can expect DX12 to be a little faster than DX11 but the benchmark tool do not support DX12, using OpenGL for gaming in OS X i think is a bad idea and i think that is the problem.
but my test is not valid because is not a real mac and i don't have a supported card
so someone need to test this on a real mac and post the results
now i’m back because i made a new discovery and i think i figure out what’s the problem is, also another user reply to me, i was running benchmarks today in both OS X EC 11.5 and in windows 10 Pro X64 using unigine heaven and unigine valley.
i will start by saying that both of these benchmark tools don’t use DX12 nor Metal, so i ran both of them using the same settings on both system and of course using OpenGL, the reason why i have to run OpenGL in windows is so i can do a fair comparison with mac OS X, El Capitan has Metal but i think we need new benchmark tools to bench Metal in OS X.
ok in windows OpenGL is a little bit faster in AVG FPS also in MIN FPS but MAX FPS is about the same, but in MIN FPS windows double mac OS X at least on my “hack” system, in AVG FPS windows also is a little bit faster by a few frames, around 10 more frames, also the difference in frames depends on the preset, i was using ultimate HD, ok now with all that out of the way let’s move on.
after running DX benchmark that where the real difference is, DX is faster than both by a reasonable margin around 30 more FPS, so i think this where all the problem comes from, DX is Microsoft so when companies like feral very good company by the way i have many games from them almost all good ports come from feral, try to port a game from windows to mac, the game comes from DX and is port into OpenGL and right there is the drop in performance.
DX in Windows is around 30 FPS faster than Windows OpenGL and Windows OpenGL is around 10 FPS faster than OS X OpenGL then when you port we can assume it can drop even more, so the only way we can get good ports in OS X is, port from DX to Metal or from Vulcan to Metal or DX to Vulcan if apple decide to use Vulcan, also that link that i posted in my first post might be the solution, another important thing is that i use DX11 we can expect DX12 to be a little faster than DX11 but the benchmark tool do not support DX12, using OpenGL for gaming in OS X i think is a bad idea and i think that is the problem.
but my test is not valid because is not a real mac and i don't have a supported card
so someone need to test this on a real mac and post the results
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Dirtyharry50
macrumors 68000
The problem here is that the days of being able to do this are numbered unless by some miracle Apple introduces a very different Mac Pro than what it has become. So as those aging Mac pros get older they will gradually fade into obsolescence and there goes that avenue. Sure it works for now but there is no future in it over the long haul just as there is no real future for an abundance of AAA on Macs. I don't see it happening even if the software aspect of things is improved and I tend to think that much is going to happen. It will not solve the largest issue of all when it comes to how many major game releases come to Mac and that is market share of not just Macs but people with Macs powerful enough to play demanding games, a presumption the software is improved to be capable of it and the fact that people playing games on those Macs are again a subset of the installed base of those systems. When this user base is compared to Windows and consoles the only thing it looks good against is Linux and that's not saying much.
So as far as OX gaming goes I think the whole thing is pretty much a moot point. There is no reason to believe the situation will do anything to dramatically change insofar as the lack of broad AAA support goes. This brings us right back to the idea that if you want broad AAA access and you want it with good performance then you can forget about Macs. I would not depend upon the ability to build a hackintosh forever as an option either. I suspect that sooner or later Apple will make changes that remove that option from the table. Even if they don't, what's the difference really if the games are not on OS X and you have to reboot for them aside of you can have an OS X computer that will do bootcamp right. At least currently you can do that but only a small number of people really will due to the technical considerations involved including having to build the thing. As such, while that works for some it hardly qualifies as a good solution for most who simply will not build and rely upon an unsupported hardware configuration.
So not to be negative but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride as the old saying goes. People can wish all they want for a world in which OS X gaming performance and title availability is anywhere close to Windows but all that is just fantasy. It isn't consistent with reality at all. It is not going to happen. This means for the long haul one might as well accept that and plan accordingly.
Apple might adopt Polaris GPUs in their next lineup refresh, but the bulk of new Macs will still have an Intel IGP powering a 4K or 5K screen.
Steam's hardware survey puts the number of Steam users running OS X at 3.57%. If we assume that and even smaller percentage of those users are running Macs capable of playing a game like the aforementioned F1 2016 at any reasonable level of detail/performance, that is an incredibly small potential audience.
Steam's hardware survey puts the number of Steam users running OS X at 3.57%. If we assume that and even smaller percentage of those users are running Macs capable of playing a game like the aforementioned F1 2016 at any reasonable level of detail/performance, that is an incredibly small potential audience.
antonis
macrumors 68020
Once again, a very well written post. Thanks.
To tell the truth, every now and then, these gaming threads leave me with a bitter taste. I see so many people nobly put more trust in mac gaming, than apple itself does. It's a shame apple leaves them out in the cold.
iamtheonlyone4ever
Suspended
agreed with all the above, but i think another problem is that apple is giving IOS priority over OS X because that's where almost all the income comes from, iPads and iPhones, so yes OS X users are left licking their wounds, if you look at iOS there are more games being develop there than in OS X. another important fact is that iOS users had Metal way before OS X users, i just hate having to use windows for gaming, this is the only reason why i installed windows and even after having window installed and all the games installed i don't even use it, i can't stand seeing the login screen and the ugly desktop, yes i must confessed i have a psychological problem with windows, it just gets me mad by looking at it, i can't help it. so i play what ever good game are available in OS X at the moment. maybe things will never change but maybe one day things will change, only time will tell. one last thing everything don't have to be ports either, i don't understand why game developers don't come with good ideas to make good native games for OS X, maybe is because there not many mac out there and they know their profit won't be that much, that's why i think game developers make more games for windows and not for OS X , it's all about the money, i'm sure if OS X would have millions of owners then it will be a totally different story
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Dirtyharry50
macrumors 68000
I decided this is a good time to change my avatar. Somehow, the look on The Nameless One's face fits the occasion.
Don't bother trying to use Macs for anything performance-related anymore. I know I don't. For my work, browsing, email, spreadsheets, basic tasks. I use my MacBook Pro 15". For anything that requires CPU or GPU compute, I use my PC.
First PC I've ever built, and I built it because Apple's hardware was completely unacceptable. They have never shipped a GPU worth anything, and even if they ship a decent CPU it is thermally crippled. The PC is such a liberating experience. Everything is fast, temps are sane, performance borders on magic. Games hum along at 60fps, Creative Suite applications don't chug anymore.
I will always have a recent PC around to do my performance-intensive tasks. I'm not sure I will always have a Mac. OS X has become frustratingly buggy. I can see a day in the not-too-distant future where I run an Ubuntu laptop and a Windows desktop. I think I could make that work and be happy with it.
First PC I've ever built, and I built it because Apple's hardware was completely unacceptable. They have never shipped a GPU worth anything, and even if they ship a decent CPU it is thermally crippled. The PC is such a liberating experience. Everything is fast, temps are sane, performance borders on magic. Games hum along at 60fps, Creative Suite applications don't chug anymore.
I will always have a recent PC around to do my performance-intensive tasks. I'm not sure I will always have a Mac. OS X has become frustratingly buggy. I can see a day in the not-too-distant future where I run an Ubuntu laptop and a Windows desktop. I think I could make that work and be happy with it.
iamtheonlyone4ever
Suspended
in my case is all the opposite , mac os x is faster than windows but maybe is because i have a hackintosh , the only thing that is faster in windows is the GPU in everything else at least on my system mac os x blows windows out the water, i used windows for over 20 years but in my personal opinion Microsoft destroyed windows after windows 7 beginning in w8, i know some people will disagree and that is fine everybody has different taste and opinions but i'm more like a classic desktop user , i know people will say technology move on we can't live in the past and all sort of things, but if i want it a tablet i will buy a tablet and what i want is a desktop pc and that mix desktop+tablet is ruining the desktop system, because i have a bunch of unnecessary apps and services that are not need it or require on a desktop os, taking extra space and using system resources, i believe that windows is a lot buggier than OS X they are still changing adding removing feature not to mentioned everything they copied from mac OS X, i won't even try to name all the features because is a long list, but then apple uses the split windows and they said apple copied that from windows , there are third party apps that does that and all apple did was integrate that to the os , so we can have that option for free , but let's say that apple did copied that from Microsoft, ok is only 1 option vs more than 20 that windows copied from mac OS X , so who copied who, the only reason windows look a bit modern is because they copied dark menu = dark theme among many more other things, windows 10 was close to a year in beta testing, really alpha then after Microsoft released the incomplete buggy windows they still are making changes why because they re still on beta, and that was also another thing they copied from apple because apple have the beta program for us to try and report back and then Microsoft in windows 10 created the insider program so the users can report back to Microsoft so they can fix bug and try to fix the system, they even dared to copied the way apple present their product when Microsoft launched the surface pro, why do i have a hackintosh because i like apple software more but i didn't wanted to pay 4,000 for the trash can because with 4,000 i can build a better system , my system with the sound system, projector , pc tower and all the accessories is close to 10,000 us dollars , it cost me 5,000 to build just the tower alone, and i'm very happy with it even with the limited amount of games because at least i got rid of windows nightmare ,malware, adware, spyware and everything that finished in ware, now in WWDC 2016 apple will show the new os, macos 12 or what ever it'll be called, it only takes apple 4 months to launch the new os, around October but microsoft can't have an os done in 2 years
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This is really hard to read. You want to invest in some punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphs.
The value of an operating system is what you can do with it. Arguments beyond that are for people with too much time on their hands. If it's not reliable, I can't do anything with it.
I don't understand how you quantify this. Considering how the Mach processing model works and how JHFS+ implements locks. I don't see a reasonable way for one operating system to be clearly faster than the other. In fact generally speaking OS X is slower in side-by-side benchmarks by a mostly inconsequential amount.
This directly contradicts my experiences. Both of what we say is purely anecdotal, so really neither of us is more right. However, just for fun, I attached screenshots of some recent bugs I have experienced. Windows has done nothing like this to me. While writing this response in Safari, selecting text stopped working reliably. Another obnoxious bug.
Who cares.
I'm not really willing to run OS X in an unsupported configuration. I want my computer to just work, I don't want to worry about system updates breaking things, having to hack kexts to get sound to work, have the computer not sleep. Either I'll run OS X on a Mac or I won't bother to run it at all. Or perhaps I'll run it in a VM. I presume where you live electronics are much more expensive?
Who cares.
The value of an operating system is what you can do with it. Arguments beyond that are for people with too much time on their hands. If it's not reliable, I can't do anything with it.
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Apple's 3D performance is pretty lacklustre, but I disagree that compute performance is lacking.
Specifically, Creative Suite performance between both platforms on similar machines seems equal.
Also, your screenshots demonstrate nothing as you can make any OS squeal if you put it in a strange enough situation.
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I don't really agree with that. If you benchmark them side by side on CPU benchmarks then yes, they appear similar. However, if you start trying to execute an extended workflow, as a professional would, you see MacBook Pros and iMacs hitting their thermal ceiling and throttling. If you can put a Mac into an ideal situation performance is fine. It's when you take them out of that situation that things get messy. Maybe it's a hot day, maybe you're dealing with a big image, maybe this work has a lot of layers. Things start to grind, get hot, get loud. This is not the case on my PC desktop, it never gets loud, it never gets hot, it never throttles. To be fair, these kinds of medium workloads are where the cylinder Mac Pro does well. But that's a lot of dollars just to get acceptable performance handling.
Not so. I don't do weird things with my computer. I use it within the confines of its design. These errors occurred within normal, sane usage. And some of them are downright inexplicable.
For example: "Your system has run out of application memory." What? I thought we lived in a time when memory was abstracted. I have plenty of hard disk space available. Something is very wrong here, and not in a harmless bug kind of way. There is a fundamental failure of the memory virtualization model to get into this state. I've seen it more than once too. Also note that if you accidentally dismiss this dialogue, you can't get it back again. There is no way to recover the halted applications from the GUI. You have to issue signal CONT with KILL from the command line. That's not good design.
And Safari is just inexcusably bad. I see that dialogue about reloading tabs all the time, and so do plenty of other people. Not to mention the horrible memory leaks.
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