Another Mac port gets cancelled due to Apple's poor graphics support

[DevNull0]

What are you doing that is causing your system to thermal throttle? Do you have specific examples of situations which cause it?

Just for fun, I loaded iMovie of my MBP and imported a few 4k video clips from my Sony FDR-AX53. 60Mbps mode. The files play at about 1 fps in the preview and after 10 seconds the fan takes off like a jet engine. The macbook has 16 gig of ram and it's the i5 dual core. The laptop is completely useless for 4k.

My normal editing machine is a desktop with i7-4790k, 16 gig of ram, and a GTX970. Running premiere elements 14 on windows 7. The thing doesn't even spin up the fan to an audible level when it plows through the video files and performance is perfect.

And the best part is the loaded desktop was cheaper than a basic MBP.

 

[wubsylol]

You're comparing a mobile i5 with Intel IGP to a desktop i7 with GTX 970.
What are you trying to demonstrate? That more powerful components are more powerful?

 

[JoeG4]

You're comparing a mobile i5 with Intel IGP to a desktop i7 with GTX 970.
What are you trying to demonstrate? That more powerful components are more powerful?

Back in the day the laptops at least tried to take a shot at being as powerful as the desktops were. Now they're fashion accessories.

 

[wubsylol]

Back in the day the laptops at least tried to take a shot at being as powerful as the desktops were. Now they're fashion accessories.

You realise you can buy powerful laptops, right? They don't all come with i5's and Intel IGPs.

 

[DevNull0]

You're comparing a mobile i5 with Intel IGP to a desktop i7 with GTX 970.
What are you trying to demonstrate? That more powerful components are more powerful?

Did you not bother reading what I was replying to before you jumped in?

First, all the fanatics insist the macbook is all the computer anyone needs.

Second, which Apple will do a better job than my PC? Certainly not the 3 year old mac pro that's several times the price.

Third, there a plenty of laptops for a lot less money then a macbook pro that will handle 4k video just fine.

 

[wubsylol]

Did you not bother reading what I was replying to before you jumped in?

You were replying to a post of mine. I wrote it, so yes, I did read it. My post was about thermal throttling, btw, did you read it before jumping in?

First, all the fanatics insist the macbook is all the computer anyone needs.

Where has someone insisted in this thread that a Macbook is all the computer anyone needs?

Second, which Apple will do a better job than my PC? Certainly not the 3 year old mac pro that's several times the price.

Can't really comment on this. I edit 4K on my iMac and don't have the same experience as you.

Third, there a plenty of laptops for a lot less money then a macbook pro that will handle 4k video just fine.

Are you complaining about the cost or power of your Macbook? Can you show me a similar specced laptop which can handle 4K video?

 

[JoeG4]

You realise you can buy powerful laptops, right? They don't all come with i5's and Intel IGPs.

They don't run Mac OS X.

Believe me it's even more frustrating on the desktop side. I want to buy a Mac desktop because I love Mac OS X, and I love unix-based OSes. Windows annoys me. However, I can't buy a Mac Desktop that has a powerful GPU. Without spending $3000, I can't even buy one that lets me choose what screen I'd like to use with it. And yes, I really like my 34" 3440x1440 ultrawide more than I like those glossy 5k screens. I'd also like to eventually upgrade to a 144Hz monitor lol.

 

[wubsylol]

Two separate issues have been raised here.

1) "The inability to smoothly playback 4K video is a reflection upon all Apple products"
This is false. There are numerous reasons why 4K playback is not smooth. Is the codec using GPU acceleration? Playback of 4K ProRes on my Air is better than the 1fps DevNull0 is experiencing, but I doubt I could watch 4K h265 because its CPU bound.
Comparing an entry-level laptop to a high-end desktop is stupid.

2) "Macs are expensive for what you get"
This is true and nobody has ever tried to deny it.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

Did you not bother reading what I was replying to before you jumped in?

First, all the fanatics insist the macbook is all the computer anyone needs.

You are completely wrong. Now pay attention. The iPad Pro is all the computer anyone needs. Tim Cook said so and that's that. Now stop comparing real computers to this stuff will you?

 

[grahamperrin]

You are completely wrong. Now pay attention. The iPad Pro is …

Heh heh https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/22963356

 

[DevNull0]

You are completely wrong. Now pay attention. The iPad Pro is all the computer anyone needs. Tim Cook said so and that's that. Now stop comparing real computers to this stuff will you?

The best part is how right you are. The iPad Pro is all the computer any *Apple user* needs. Because Timmy has made it clear anyone who wants more shouldn't be shopping at Apple.

Apple will become the iToy company and the rest of the industry will continue quite happily. At least once all the old-school Apple fans finally give up and move on.

And to keep the thread on topic, everyone needs stop complaining about mac ports being cancelled and buy a windows gaming PC. The sooner you do, the happier you'll be.
[doublepost=1465181364][/doublepost]

Are you complaining about the cost or power of your Macbook? Can you show me a similar specced laptop which can handle 4K video?

Absolutely complaining about the power. I'm quite happy to pay Apple's prices for a machine that capable of real work and not just browsing facebook and uploading pictures to instagram. (And for me, real work is editing 4k video, Nikon D810 raw files, and somewhat decent gaming). I've owned quite a few powerbooks and macbook pros over the years, and the price has never been an issue.

But, while I am willing to pay Apple's price without complaining, I will point out that even though Apple won't provide decent power at any price, all the other major players do provide amazing power at much lower prices than Apple's wimpy machines.

 

[jeanlain]

2) "Macs are expensive for what you get"
This is true and nobody has ever tried to deny it.

Depends. Have you looked at that 5K Dell monitor?

 

[Irishman]

Just for fun, I loaded iMovie of my MBP and imported a few 4k video clips from my Sony FDR-AX53. 60Mbps mode. The files play at about 1 fps in the preview and after 10 seconds the fan takes off like a jet engine. The macbook has 16 gig of ram and it's the i5 dual core. The laptop is completely useless for 4k.

My normal editing machine is a desktop with i7-4790k, 16 gig of ram, and a GTX970. Running premiere elements 14 on windows 7. The thing doesn't even spin up the fan to an audible level when it plows through the video files and performance is perfect.

And the best part is the loaded desktop was cheaper than a basic MBP.

I have always thought that the public's love affair with the laptop would come back home to roost.

When people start buying a device because their friends buy it, and because they buy the "desktop replacement " lie, then it has become a trend, not a choice. In other words, laptop has become the default. When someone says "I am thinking about getting a computer ", the picture in most people's heads is that of a laptop.

Your experience reminds me that this might be already happening. (Coming home to roost).

 

[antonis]

Why bother with 4k arguments ? I have an MBP 15" 2015 model and it drops frames on expose if I have more than a few windows open (the gesture that shows all open windows). Sometimes it drops frames when scrolling through desktops as well. And that's on the medium retina setting although I'd prefer to work on the high res desktop since I need the screen estate. Turning to high res retina, things get really ugly. Again, talking about plain desktop windows management, not video processing.

I have a machine that apple calls "pro" because it has ports (!) and more - soldered - memory than the other models. And still it cannot handle its own desktop appropriately. You see...the problem is that this "pro" machine comes with an igpu.

 

[Little Endian]

Well, so do I (not $5,000, but better than anything Apple makes). But really, this is besides the point.

I didn't want this topic to derail to hardware. I see that as a separate issue. There is nothing hardware-wise in admittedly Apple's weak line that prevents Macs from playing these cancelled ports. Unless we start talking about VR, this is a software problem first and foremost.

Always has been a software problem, it has been ever since the Power PC days. It has been a decade now since the switch to Intel and the gaming situation on the Mac is just as bad as it has ever been. People used to blame Power PC for poor gaming performance on the Mac and many thought the switch to Intel would have helped. In reality it was never really a hardware issue aside from the normal limited range of GPU options offered in macs. The main culprit has always been piss poor drivers for the GPU and poor or outdated graphics API implementation in OSX.

 

[jeanlain]

I keep saying that, but drivers are only part of the problem, not all of it.
For instance, when Valve games were ported, performance was quite lower than on Windows. Valve kept saying it was only Apple's fault. Apple fixed some stuff in the 10.6.4 graphics update and performance indeed increased. But it was only after Valve ported its games to Linux and provided better openGL support in Source (that is, more than an on-the-fly translation layer) that performance really jumped. I tested it. So poor performances were in a great part Valve's fault.
I believe it's not an isolated case.

 

[asoksevil]

IMO, they should have abandoned OpenGL after they had a Metal version at least on par with it. Losing market's faith is not good, and it is difficult to win it back, even if/when they release a full-featured Metal API.

Instead of the above, in El.Cap. they "froze" the - already old from the yosemite era - OpenGL in the same old version, and released Metal that cannot fully stand in today's game standards. Therefore, abandoning the platform (from a dev's point of view) seems more and more probable. What can we say ? Bad decisions are bad.

Metal is only supported on Macs manufactured in 2012 and later. If you just drop OpenGL (which will never happen) you will leave behind tons of users who have a 2008-2012 machine capable of running the latest OS X.

What some publishers are doing e.g Blizzard is offering both versions. An OpenGL for those who cannot run Metal, and Metal for those who can.

2) "Macs are expensive for what you get"
This is true and nobody has ever tried to deny it.

It really depends on which one. If you said the Mac Pro I would certainly agree with you but if you say something like the Retina MacBook Pro, MacBook Air... honestly speaking the alternative Windows versions with similar hardware and design cues (aluminum case for instance) are about the same.

 

[jeanlain]

Metal is only supported on Macs manufactured in 2012 and later. If you just drop OpenGL (which will never happen) you will leave behind tons of users who have a 2008-2012 machine capable of running the latest OS X.

He said that Apple abandoned openGL too soon.

 

[antonis]

Metal is only supported on Macs manufactured in 2012 and later. If you just drop OpenGL (which will never happen) you will leave behind tons of users who have a 2008-2012 machine capable of running the latest OS X.

What some publishers are doing e.g Blizzard is offering both versions. An OpenGL for those who cannot run Metal, and Metal for those who can.



It really depends on which one. If you said the Mac Pro I would certainly agree with you but if you say something like the Retina MacBook Pro, MacBook Air... honestly speaking the alternative Windows versions with similar hardware and design cues (aluminum case for instance) are about the same.

Maybe I didn't choose the perfect word for this (english not being my native language doesn't help to choose the best possible words when under rush). Replace "drop" with "abandon" or "freeze". They froze their OpenGL support too soon. That is, before Metal was ready to take over (and I mean metal ought to be on par feature-wise with the latest OpenGL/directx not the apple's version).

He said that Apple abandoned openGL too soon.

Exactly this. Thanks.

 

[asoksevil]

Maybe I didn't choose the perfect word for this (english not being my native language doesn't help to choose the best possible words when under rush). Replace "drop" with "abandon" or "freeze". They froze their OpenGL support too soon. That is, before Metal was ready to take over (and I mean metal ought to be on par feature-wise with the latest OpenGL/directx not the apple's version).

No worries, thanks for the explanation.

 

[iamtheonlyone4ever]

hello can't wait for wwdc 2016 , i just want to shared my latest test and experience with you guys , i ran GFXBench GL and GFXBench Metal to compare OpenGL vs Metal results on OS X and my discovery so far is that metal is already 2 times faster than OpenGL or double the speed , of course this needs to be tested on supported genuine apple hardware but for me now i'm not worried any more i just hope game developers start making metal ready games so we can enjoy playing in OS X , both of those apps can be download it for free in the app store and make sure you compare results using the same test with both apps

 

[mildocjr]

I'm just going to add to this. Games ported to Mac from Windows more often than not run like crap. The reason why is that game developers make a game optimized for Windows then later come back and rewrite the code with typically a much smaller team for Mac, this decreases the amount of time that the developers can use for code optimizations and testing. Basically bet it all on Windows, do what we can for Mac but don't count on profits from that group. Likewise, games made for iOS ported to Windows and Android run like crap unless they are optimized for the platform.

You really can't compare Tomb Raider or Bioshock because those were Windows first games, of course they are going to have great performance on Windows compared to Mac.

I'm not saying that a game can't have great performance on both platforms, I'm saying most developers pick a platform for their cash cow and then when people ask for a game on another platform they don't want to support they give it a quick glance over and say "here you go. You asked for it but we don't care enough about <insert platform> to make it great."

I honestly don't care what platform you praise, that's not why I'm chiming in, I'm just stating that if you take a single game by an age old Windows developer and try to compare it to their version for Mac, yeah it's going to suffer, what's your point?

If your arguing about what platform to play games on, as a die hard Mac fan, I'll tell you get a Windows computer. It is a better investment for your entertainment needs to spend $3,000 on a custom built Windows PC than it is the same $3000 spent on a top of the line Mac.

Mac's are great for journaling, music production, photo editing, and graphic design.

Windows computers are good for business compatibility and gaming.

Linux is good for going cheap and having a great server.

The big problem I see in most threads is that people tend to choose a computer based off the imagined status that comes with the computer rather than the functionality they need from it.

 

[Evil Spoonman]

hello can't wait for wwdc 2016 , i just want to shared my latest test and experience with you guys , i ran GFXBench GL and GFXBench Metal to compare OpenGL vs Metal results on OS X and my discovery so far is that metal is already 2 times faster than OpenGL or double the speed , of course this needs to be tested on supported genuine apple hardware but for me now i'm not worried any more i just hope game developers start making metal ready games so we can enjoy playing in OS X , both of those apps can be download it for free in the app store and make sure you compare results using the same test with both apps

I was curious about this, so I grabbed the benchmark apps and tested.

First of all why are the assets for the OpenGL test suite considerably smaller than the Metal assets? Does Metal lack texture decompression APIs so the images cannot be provided compressed? Seems weird. Edit: The Metal version of the test downloads assets for additional tests. That is why it is biggger.

Secondly, in my test results Metal certainly isn't 2x as fast.

Manhattan Offscreen
- OpenGL: 4,358.2 frames
- Metal: 3,265.5 frames
Metal is about 25% slower.

T-Rex Offscreen
- OpenGL: 10,033 frames
- Metal: 8,027 frames
Metal is about 20% slower.

ALU 2 Offscreen
- OpenGL: 10,581 frames
- Metal: 11,285 frames
Metal is about 6% faster.

Driver Overhead Offscreen
- OpenGL: 4,629 frames
- Metal: 13,560 frames
Metal is about 66% faster.

Texturing Offscreen
- OpenGL: 16,259 MTexel/s
- Metal: 10,696 MTexel/s
Metal is about 34% slower.

Metal seems to be hitting that target of decreasing driver overhead. In practice, that does not seem to have a useful effect on gaming frame rates. Metal is about 20-25% slower for both Manhattan and T-Rex high level benchmarks. I ran Metal first, waited about 30 minutes at idle to remove excess heat from the laptop, and then ran OpenGL. The was no change in background workload.

This is on the fastest laptop Apple currently ships (not for long!). A 15" Retina MacBook Pro with i7-4980HQ and Radeon R9 M370X.

 

[iamtheonlyone4ever]

hi , remember i said i have unsupported hardware that's why maybe my results are different than yours , but i assure you in my system metal dobles OpenGL , maybe if i have time later or during the week i will post the screenshots , but then again they will be invalid for most of the mac users because i have a hackintosh but is also good to know your results , thanks for the info , i also found this to be very interesting

First of all why are the assets for the OpenGL test suite considerably smaller than the Metal assets? Does Metal lack texture decompression APIs so the images cannot be provided compressed? Seems weird. Edit: The Metal version of the test downloads assets for additional tests. That is why it is bigger.

so is good to know that thanks

i also did notice the difference is file size but i though that had to do because they were different apps

but then i find out that the metal app have some more benchmarks options that the other app does not have , so i think maybe that is the reason for the difference in size

 

[iamtheonlyone4ever]

ok here are the screenshots like i promise , if i'm misinterpreting the results please tell me , also remember that this is in "unsupported" nvidia 970 , i don't know if this happens because of the web drivers , but like i said in my system it doubles the frames and fps as you can see in the results , keep in mind that my card in windows goes even higher but these results are just in OS X and also these apps are not available in windows. but i think is a fair score in OS X at least games should be playable. i don't know what is the reason for this but one thing is for sure , these are the results.

i see you ran offscreen test and i didn't , i will try that test later maybe that is the difference , thanks for the detail

ok i removed the old pictures and replaced them with the new pictures
this time i ran both test
onscreen and offscreen
again onscreen metal doubles onscreen OpenGL
offscreen metal double only offscreen manhattan
but offscreen t-rex didn’t doble but it did increase around 25% to 30% more
if i’m not mistaken
i think it will be a difference in games FPS once game developers begins making games using metal. the reason why you might not seen a diference now is because the games are using OpenGL and not metal , but as you can see metal improve FPS in this metal ready benchmark app , the same will happen with metal ready games in the future , i also think that to take advantage of metal full potential you need compatible hardware that can support all metal features and capabilities, anyway like a said can't wait for the next os , i don't care what they call it