Most of the lacking features have been addressed with Sierra. It's bugs that are holding Ferals titles up now.
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Gaming Passing Us BY Now
- Thread starter Washac
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Most of the lacking features have been addressed with Sierra. It's bugs that are holding Ferals titles up now.
There is a difference between not good and not to your taste.
But an expected one considering how many versions behind Apple's OpenGL support falls.
Despite these limitations, OpenGL at least works, and doesn't cause crashes on what happen to be the only dedicated GPUs Apple uses in recent Mac models…
Yeah, I wish they would have stayed with OpenGL and Vulcan. I can only assume UE ditched apple's OpenGL because of its age, hence lacking required features. Many other companies prefer to entirely skip Mac as well lately, regardless of OpenGL or Metal.
I have tested World of Warcraft under OSX/Metal API vs the same hardware under Boot Camp. OSX/Metal is a BIG improvement over OSX/Open GL, but doesn't beat Direct X under Windows. The difference is still significant enough to make you want dual boot. I'd say about 10 - 15 frames in difference (same game, same hardware).
Apple needs to get it through their thick heads that gaming is a HUGE part of entertainment these days and will continue to grow in the future. It could very well replace TV in future generations. Look at twitch accounts and the market for people watching people play games.
In the future I can see people looking at TV and thinking how stupid it is that people are just sitting there doing nothing, and not interacting with the story. This idea was exemplified in an episode of Star Trek Voyager where they look back at the TV and say: "I can't imagine watching a story and not being a part of it".
Apple needs to get it through their thick heads that gaming is a HUGE part of entertainment these days and will continue to grow in the future. It could very well replace TV in future generations. Look at twitch accounts and the market for people watching people play games.
In the future I can see people looking at TV and thinking how stupid it is that people are just sitting there doing nothing, and not interacting with the story. This idea was exemplified in an episode of Star Trek Voyager where they look back at the TV and say: "I can't imagine watching a story and not being a part of it".
Good thing Epic don't base their product development roadmaps on MacRumors ********ing, then.
Most recent statement from Cyan why the Mac version of Obduction – an UE4 game, in case you forgot – is still not coming:
But, yeah, "********ing". Sure.
Also interesting: this recent statement from Feral on their Facebook page why DX:MD (and all the other delayed games) is still not coming for Mac:
"We are waiting for Metal to be able to handle the game."
Makes it pretty clear in whose court the ball now is.
This was expected, mate. Apple has froze opengl during the last 2 OS X / macOS versions (IIRC), while it was already falling back before that. We have only apple to thank for this.
Speaking about the AMD/Apple drivers, I think everyone could get the whole picture by thinking of this fact; the latest Mac Pro (2013) although it has 2 GPUs connected in crossfire (h/w wise), their macOS drivers are still not supporting crossfire functionality. Never did, and still does not after all these years. In order to have crossfire you just have to boot in windows. That says a lot.
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Metal has been the default in UE4 for Mac since its introduction in UE4 4.11, removing it is hardly bold at this point because most problems we've had are resolved and it is substantially better than the OpenGL support it replaces. The Editor is in good shape and support for advanced rendering features is increasing. For our use cases Metal is actually pretty complete in 10.12 (10.11 lacked a few things) - there's no omission that causes us major problems. Other developers' mileage will vary and I can't speak for them. Consequently it is no longer worth dividing our development effort as only Metal will progress from here.
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Their statement makes it clear that it *is* coming and that having worked with us (Epic) & Apple there are only a few issues left to deal with. Cyan are still working with us & Apple to get Mac Obduction ready.
The statement suggests the current problems are with the AMD drivers - but don't assume that means it is AMD or Apple's fault - there's a lot of places that things can go wrong in a modern game renderer. As I've posted about before - working with Cyan on Obduction helped identify and fix a whole range of issues within UE4's Metal support that ended up making UE4 4.14 and now 4.15 much better releases than they otherwise would have been. Not everything is Apple/AMD/Nvidia/Intel's fault.
Again - I can only speak for UE4, Feral et. al. may have other issues, but ours really stem from not having shipped enough titles. That's been the frustrating part of the last few months, but once we get over this initial hump and ship a few I hope (& quietly expect) that it will get easier in future.
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I have a bone to pick with the assumption that Vulkan would have fixed things. Epic are committed to Vulkan through Khronos but it was standardised well over a year after Metal first shipped on iOS and more than six-months after we started work on Mac Metal support. Consequently the present UE4 Vulkan support is well behind Mac Metal support, so it couldn't possibly solve any issues in Mac UE4. It would not solve anything feature-wise either, as the features that Metal lacks are *optional* in the Vulkan spec. so vendors are not required to implement them so they could still be absent on Mac. That's how MoltenVK functions - it omits the optional functions that can't be implemented on top of Metal but is still a perfectly valid implementation of Vulkan.
I have *considerably* more sympathy for the idea that had Apple continued development of OpenGL the transition might not have been so hard. OTOH given what I know of the OpenGL stack on Mac I'm not entirely sure that it would have been feasible.
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Percentage of Windows is a bit more enlightening - Metal is much closer to Windows D3D than Mac OpenGL was in UE4. How much varies by project & vendor, but it can be ~10% difference. Some of that can even be accounted for on Macs with Retina displays - though accounting for & addressing are different things. Closing this gap remains a focus.
Question: why would Apple develop Metal & work with Epic et. al. if they weren't aware of this?
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I believe it is safe to assume that apple's interest in Metal is focused mainly within the context of mobile gaming. It's getting obvious that this is their strategic choice.
Regarding OpenGL, I just think apple would be wiser to keep it, support it and update it along with Metal, until the later is completed. That way, they'd give no excuse to some game makers to abandon the platform and lose all these triple-A projects; even the ones that were under development.
At the end of the day, fact is that even if mac desktop gaming seems to get better in theory, in practice it is at its worst point right now (always having the top-titles released for mac as criteria). Gaming do passing us by.
Okay, maybe an imprecise choice of words from my side: what I meant was "why it still isn't there and why they still cannot give anything even vaguely resembling an ETA for it."
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Obviously it was their strategy to focus on Metal for mobile first, as it initially launched on iOS. Given that iOS is the bigger market for them it would only be natural for iOS to be given priority. Once they shipped it on Mac though their aims for Metal expanded - this is the API for 3D on all their platforms now and they are deadly serious about improving it for Mac.
In an ideal world I think they might have done that but the world of Mac OpenGL was never ideal. They'd have ended up dividing focus between OpenGL and Metal to the detriment of both. Now having shipped Metal they aren't going to go back and implement several years worth of OpenGL updates.
AFAIK the current Feral titles are delayed, not cancelled, only F1 2015 bit the bullet. In some ways this feels like being stuck in a time-loop to the Intel transition when I was at Feral and the games also ended up being delayed for quite a while... but they did ship then and I'm sure they will now. I don't think we're losing too many announced titles but we're definitely not getting as many confirmed. Then again there aren't as many AAA games being developed full stop, so any delays or omissions are just that much more obvious.
Yeah, I can agree with that. We're all paying a price in the move to Metal, but Apple's intentions are good and Metal does solve the bulk of performance and feature-support issues of Mac OpenGL. Unfortunately realising the benefits and shipping actual games has been far harder than I had hoped which is why Mac gaming has ended up in this lull. I don't believe it will stay this way though.
Sadly, mac gaming got a few major let downs lately. I can think of Witcher 3 (it's really a shame mac gamers missed this gem) that Mac version is literally frozen, Overwatch and Elite Dangerous expansion. And these are only titles that were expected / being developed for mac. There's still an entire world of triple-A games where mac never even gets in the radar.
Excuse me but I get 60 - 70 fps (with lowest being 50 fps) on ultra settings with my modified bootcamp drivers in Windows with the M295X when running it via the Vulkan api.
That's great: it's more powerful for gaming than I thought! Regardless my post wasn't anti-Apple by any means.
Just that gaming isn't why people get a Mac and it's not at all a priority for Apple's designers (and rightly so). Any supported games or great games performance is purely incidental, rather than what it was designed for.
TW3 was never coming to Mac. It was momentarily announced for Linux, but then retracted.
This overarching issue was mentioned in another thread; people assume - wrongly - that a game will come to a Mac, despite no formal indication either way, and then get disappointed when it doesn't.
There's an entire world of triple-A games where Mac never even gets on the radar because it has ~3% of the market share.
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It would be really nice if gaming were thriving on Mac, but it's not. I fear the gap between PC gaming and Mac gaming has become so huge that it would take a strong investment by Apple to close it. As a matter of fact, I do all my gaming on the computer I built.
Soul Calibur 5 ; Released 2012.
Final Fantasy 15 ; Released 2016.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 ; Released 2016.
Street Fighter 5 ; Released 2016.
The Gamergate Recruitment Hotline called. It's for you.
The initial announcement included Mac and there were even a few files to pre-download for OS X, like the installer executable IIRC, before release date. Even now in GoG site, the GoG downloader page has an (empty now) OS X section. 3% of market share was never the real reason. The 3 examples I've given in my previous post are not from developers that ignored mac because of its market share.
It's infecting the US developers - you forgot the WAY, WAY, OVERATED "Overwatch"...
