No, works for me – but the performance of the Metal renderer has become somewhat worse again and there are a few new bugs that I haven't seen before (others have been fixed, though).
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OS X List of Mac Metal games
- Thread starter jeanlain
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Can you confirm the window title bar doesn't say "openGL" ? Because yes, the game launches with the "Metal" preset, but actually it's the openGL renderer. I tried everything, but I could not make it use Metal. Apparently, some have reported this issue after the 1.77 version.
Ah, you're correct: it indeed says "OpenGL3" in the window title. As I normally run the game in fullscreen, I didn't notice that.
Interestingly, that would mean that instead of the Metal renderer having become slower, as I first suspected, the OpenGL renderer became more performant, by about 15–20%.
Tested it and it works really really well, with some setting it looses 3-4fps compared to Windows, but with other combination of settings it's actually faster, overall a great porting especially considering that has not been natively build for Metal, probably a better API then it looks like, just scarce interest for obvious reasons.
It was removed from Heroes a while back and remains that way. SC2 has it, but still marked as beta.
Elder Scrolls Online switched to Metal – in a way:
This move effectively broke the game, as it's unplayably slow for everyone on a Mac now.
This move effectively broke the game, as it's unplayably slow for everyone on a Mac now.
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I haven't really understood that as well. There just wasn't any hurry. They could as well left the OpenGL renderer in for the mean time and leave the MoltenVK/Metal renderer as beta option or something.
Either that or Zenimax Online doesn't have a grip on Vulkan yet. Vulkan is hard.
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Completely agree Eric5h5. OpenCL was also initially developed by Apple and then Apple helped make it an standard with the Khronos Group.
The main reason I have never used FaceTime is its Apple only. The main thing I hate about Metal is its proprietary Apple only.
The main reason I have never used FaceTime is its Apple only. The main thing I hate about Metal is its proprietary Apple only.
I spoke to a developer on twitter who was posting about the change. He basically said they had to get off of OpenGL because they changed the engines particle effects to use the GPU instead of the CPU, and they needed compute shaders for it.
He also said that the main reason they went with Vulkan wrapped with MoltenVK instead of metal directly, is because they didn't have anyone on the team that knew metal..... Which doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
So they wrote a Vulkan backend (bugs), wrapped it in MoltenVK (bugs), which translates to Metal (more bugs)... Instead of debugging Metal, they have to do all 3, which is.. Not optimal.
Didn't ESO lose it's single (but awesome) Mac dude a few years ago after the engine was updated to OGL4? I guess Mac support after that was handled by Windows guys who knew OpenGL.
Perhaps the development team should hire devs who know about Metal.
These guys are so short-sighted. 🙄 Metal is one of the most popular 3D API if you count iOS. See how Epic games and others have embraced it on iOS. It worked pretty well for them. I'm sure the modern iDevices can run a game like ESO, as well as future Elder Scroll games.
These guys are so short-sighted. 🙄 Metal is one of the most popular 3D API if you count iOS. See how Epic games and others have embraced it on iOS. It worked pretty well for them. I'm sure the modern iDevices can run a game like ESO, as well as future Elder Scroll games.
They did, Chris was on contract from memory. He did a really great job with the OpenGL renderer. He left as soon as it was finished.
Ugh…
This is exactly why a proprietary graphics API for a niche operating system is a stupid idea.
Keep in mind that this is not Bethesda, but Zenimax Online. Most likely, not a single programmer who ever worked on a Bethesda Elder Scrolls game (let alone the upcoming iOS spinoff) has contributed a single line of code for ESO – or vice versa.
Even taking iOS into account, the Metal ecosystem is still dwarved by all the platforms that do not support it. Furthermore, I would bet that 99.9% of all developers who in theory could come into contact with Metal by supporting iOS or macOS don't actually have experience with that API, as they are either using ready-made engines like Unity or UE4, or use Apple's own abstraction layers like GameKit.
That makes Metal experienced developers a rare commodity. It probably wouldn't pay off for Zenimax Online to try to find and hire one these exotic beasts just to provide proper support for a tiny fraction of their userbase.
With the time it's taken them to build the Vulkan renderer, and now try fix it, as well as fixing bugs in MoltenVK, and having to poke into metal... They could have simply learnt metal.
Croteam is a good example.
http://www.croteam.com/we-decide-to-implement-ios-support/#more-5747
In one month, one person learnt metal, and had a game running on iOS.
It's a very well documented api, as well as having excellent debugging tools.
Other than Dota2 (which they spent months tweaking MoltenVK for)... What else do we have apart from ESO?
And it's not looking good for ESO...