Metro Redux performance issue is "just" a bug in interaction with the Nvidia drivers. The port is actually not bad, on Intel iGPUs it's playable and on AMD GPUs the performance is awesome.
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Mac and Metal
- Thread starter TallManNY
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I think merely porting the code to a new API won't give you any performance advantages whatsoever. I'll admit I don't know much about Metal in comparison to DX, but I assume that it uses old OpenGL calls for backwards compatibility. Much like running a DX11 game won't give you any performance increases whatever when running it under DX12, running older games in Metal that have been merely ported over without any tweaking under the hood will give you the same results.
It's a low level API. A layer of abstraction has been removed so developers can more directly talk to the hardware, squeezing more performance from it than they once could. But they'll have to write new code to take advantage of it. What this means is that old games won't run any better than they did before, but new games, or old games rewritten specifically for Metal/DX12/Vulkan will be able to do far more than they previously could with lower end hardware.
Too bad.
For me, the performance is measured in seconds per frame, not frames per second.
Terrible. Unplayable is not hyperbole unfortunately.
I figured as much. I was using you more as a sounding board, since some people might be confused about the subject.
Like on some of the Win10 beta boards, you see tons of people griping about how games don't run any better there than they do in 8.1, despite having DX12 installed by default.
I'd love to see some performance improvements in Diablo 3. Running it on OSX I get 80fps, and on the same hardware via bootcamp I get 100+. Go figure.
DX12 or Metal won't necessarily make existing games go faster. DX12 & Metal give you a way of issuing graphics work that takes dramatically less CPU time than before. This is a benefit when the game is CPU bound, struggling to issue work to the GPU fast enough to keep it saturated, a much bigger problem on console & mobile than high-end gaming PCs. For the Mac there's a bit more room for optimism since the OpenGL driver stack was never as optimised as D3D11.
On on the Mac, benchmarks routinely show that the gap in performance with Windows is greater at low display resolution. This means that the CPU code is limiting performance on the Mac, so it will particularly benefit from Metal, possibly more than Windows games will benefit from Vulkan/DX12.
And yet, neither configuration could be considered deficient. Either 80fps or 100fps are varying degrees of awesome, and I personally would dismiss neither.
Yeah, I don't understand how you could tell the game play difference between either of those specs. I've always thought that as long as you had 30 FPS then a game was very playable. But I don't play Diablo.
I think that person is just bringing up that there is a 20% or more difference in rendering times between Windows and OS X which doesn't just affect high FPS situations but most ported games. This can have a huge impact comparing a 24fps to a 30fps experience. Often the experiences are even worse than 20%.
From my experience, at 1440p, D3 had an average of ~45fps in OS X, and over 85 in Windows. In some demanding scenes where the system was reaching its lowest fps, the difference was very obvious. This was a few patches ago, however, so no idea if the gap has been closed a bit now.
I definitely don't mind getting 80fps. However, I would like to see a boost in performance that will affect other games better.
There is a point where it can drop significantly when in a large scale battle in D3. Nothing game breaking I gather, but still...
Exactly. Thanks for explaining it better than I could lol.
In consideration of the fact that Metal offers improvements to performance in a variety of ways, I think for now it would be exceedingly difficult to make any kind of accurate predictions about performance in any particular game whether it be a reworked existing game or a new release. There's just a lot of variables in play. I am basing this view on this quote from Apple's own statement about what Metal brings to the table:
"Metal speeds system-level graphics rendering by up to 50 percent,4 as well as making it up to 40 percent more efficient.5 Metal allows the main processor and graphics processor to work more effectively together, boosting high-performance apps. And Metal is designed to be great for games, improving draw call performance by up to 10x and paving the way for new levels of realism and detail.6"
The rest of that little bit and the footnotes can be read here: http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/
You'll need to scroll down quite a ways to get to that section.
So until we see some existing games upgraded to take advantage of Metal there's really nothing to compare yet. Also, I would guess only select leading titles will even get that attention. For the most part it will just be new titles built from the start with this tech where we see it. So we won't have any way to know really how it would have run without Metal vs with Metal.
That's all fine. I am just saying I think it is premature to form any kind of conclusions just yet as really it is all pure speculation based on only one known point which is that it is reasonable to expect a good performance increase across the board for games using Metal. Even there, we all define "good performance" differently to some degree.
As I've said before, I am certainly looking forward to seeing what kind of games we can play and the settings we can get on them with smooth, playable performance. I just wouldn't have a clue based on what is known now if I was to pull a game out of my hat and try to speculate on what FPS increase I might see with Metal. Not only that but the tendency of many of us will probably continue to be balancing what graphics features and resolution we play at while maintaining a steady, smooth FPS. Again, lots of variables there so not an easy thing to speculate on in terms of real world performance.
Game benchmarks on various Mac hardware for Metal titles will certainly be interesting, the best ones in my opinion being something like World of Warcraft which Blizzard has stated is going to be upgraded to utilize Metal in a future patch. I'd think that based on that their other games will too. Benchmarks of those games before and after on a Mac system would at least give some idea of what real FPS gain was to be had in that particular case.
It's worthy of note as most of you know I'm sure, what happens and is shown in one game really isn't all that telling by itself. It's trends across a good number of releases that will give a much better picture of what Metal really means to performance of OS X native games.
For now, with no disrespect intended toward anyone, I am not buying into any sort of ideas about expectations for x FPS in this game or that because the data is not existent to support those figures. You just can't extrapolate that out of stated best case percentages of multiple variables by Apple yet.
All that said, I am not a developer of Mac games so if Edwin or Blair were to come along and provide further insight into this and what to expect, I would believe them. They would know better than anybody what this means in real world terms although I wonder if they would not be hesitant to make any forecasts either until they have some code written and built using this to test for themselves. And then there is probably an NDA at this point anyway so I imagine we'll have to wait on any news like that.
I forgot to mention that regardless of what one might think of the chosen game by Epic to demo Metal at the keynote, one thing was certain. Epic pointed out that they observed major gains to performance in the game being shown when built with Metal. That game might not have looked all that impressive visually, but the demands on the system are which meant it actually was a good demonstration of Metal. I think too many people just looked at the graphics style without taking that into account even though during the demo it was mentioned how much was going on concurrently to put all those pixels up there.
"Metal speeds system-level graphics rendering by up to 50 percent,4 as well as making it up to 40 percent more efficient.5 Metal allows the main processor and graphics processor to work more effectively together, boosting high-performance apps. And Metal is designed to be great for games, improving draw call performance by up to 10x and paving the way for new levels of realism and detail.6"
The rest of that little bit and the footnotes can be read here: http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/
You'll need to scroll down quite a ways to get to that section.
So until we see some existing games upgraded to take advantage of Metal there's really nothing to compare yet. Also, I would guess only select leading titles will even get that attention. For the most part it will just be new titles built from the start with this tech where we see it. So we won't have any way to know really how it would have run without Metal vs with Metal.
That's all fine. I am just saying I think it is premature to form any kind of conclusions just yet as really it is all pure speculation based on only one known point which is that it is reasonable to expect a good performance increase across the board for games using Metal. Even there, we all define "good performance" differently to some degree.
As I've said before, I am certainly looking forward to seeing what kind of games we can play and the settings we can get on them with smooth, playable performance. I just wouldn't have a clue based on what is known now if I was to pull a game out of my hat and try to speculate on what FPS increase I might see with Metal. Not only that but the tendency of many of us will probably continue to be balancing what graphics features and resolution we play at while maintaining a steady, smooth FPS. Again, lots of variables there so not an easy thing to speculate on in terms of real world performance.
Game benchmarks on various Mac hardware for Metal titles will certainly be interesting, the best ones in my opinion being something like World of Warcraft which Blizzard has stated is going to be upgraded to utilize Metal in a future patch. I'd think that based on that their other games will too. Benchmarks of those games before and after on a Mac system would at least give some idea of what real FPS gain was to be had in that particular case.
It's worthy of note as most of you know I'm sure, what happens and is shown in one game really isn't all that telling by itself. It's trends across a good number of releases that will give a much better picture of what Metal really means to performance of OS X native games.
For now, with no disrespect intended toward anyone, I am not buying into any sort of ideas about expectations for x FPS in this game or that because the data is not existent to support those figures. You just can't extrapolate that out of stated best case percentages of multiple variables by Apple yet.
All that said, I am not a developer of Mac games so if Edwin or Blair were to come along and provide further insight into this and what to expect, I would believe them. They would know better than anybody what this means in real world terms although I wonder if they would not be hesitant to make any forecasts either until they have some code written and built using this to test for themselves. And then there is probably an NDA at this point anyway so I imagine we'll have to wait on any news like that.
I forgot to mention that regardless of what one might think of the chosen game by Epic to demo Metal at the keynote, one thing was certain. Epic pointed out that they observed major gains to performance in the game being shown when built with Metal. That game might not have looked all that impressive visually, but the demands on the system are which meant it actually was a good demonstration of Metal. I think too many people just looked at the graphics style without taking that into account even though during the demo it was mentioned how much was going on concurrently to put all those pixels up there.
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Especially for that part, I was one of them that were left concerned. The visuals were indeed not something that could justify the context under which they were presented (e.g. a new revolutionary graphics technology that will bring a new breath to Mac gaming). At least they should give away some facts/numbers. For instance, it would be useful if they at least shared how the game was running before and after metal (fps-wise), or how many polygons they could have with and without it, or - at the very least - how implementing it with Metal affected in a positive way the minimum specs to run it.
Heck, even Elder Scrolls Online looks better and it is not implemented with Metal (hey Zenimax, that was a hint
). I think Epic should have supported their case better.
It's interesting – if Metal will make games on OS X perform somewhat as they currently do in Windows (pre DirectX 12, which also has lower overhead like Metal) how will games in Windows perform when they are DirectX 12 enabled. :-|
Youre thinking the wrong way .
Metal will make games perform like DirectX12 games, under OSX. It will more or less equal the performance between the platforms. However, the difference between DirectX 12 games, and lets say DirectX11 will not be that big as you would imagine. It is a big difference for AMD GPUs, less for Nvidia.
.Metal will make games perform like DirectX12 games, under OSX
. It will more or less equal the performance between the platforms. However, the difference between DirectX 12 games, and lets say DirectX11 will not be that big as you would imagine. It is a big difference for AMD GPUs, less for Nvidia.
Youre thinking the wrong way
Metal will make games perform like DirectX12 games, under OSX
Good – yea, you're right. That's more like it.
Youre thinking the wrong way
Metal will make games perform like DirectX12 games, under OSX
I dunno about that. There's this one DX12 games in the works, I'll find out the name later, that has an absolutely ridiculous amount of stuff going down onscreen at once. All these low-level APIs seem to give HUGE boosts to games.
Though there is one advantage DX12 has that Metal (currently) doesn't: the ability to use multiple GPUs of different makes in an SLI-like setup. It can even use the discrete and integrated GPUs in a computer together.
Youre thinking the wrong way
Metal will make games perform like DirectX12 games, under OSX
I doubt it. I imagine there is the possibility that Metal and DX12 can perform equally, but way, way more resources will be spent on optimising the code on DX12. One can dream, though...
I assume you are talking about the Square Enix demo?