Metal Developer Tools on Windows Offer New Gaming Opportunities

[MacRumors]

Game developers are now able to more easily develop games for Apple devices using Windows machines, thanks to a new set of Metal developer tools released by Apple (via Reddit).

Apple quietly released a set of Metal Developer Tools for Windows 10 at WWDC this year, which enables Metal Shading Language (MSL) compilation on Windows into Metal Library Objects targeting Apple platforms. This means that game production teams may now use PCs to compile games developed on Windows for macOS and other Apple operating systems.

Many game development studios have established game or graphics asset production pipelines that use the Microsoft Windows infrastructure. One of the key final steps in the asset creation process is compiling the graphics and compute shaders for inclusion in the game.

Since Apple is transitioning the Mac to custom silicon, developers that bring their games to Metal will be able to run them on iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and macOS. Apple's API automatically translates all inputs to whatever the available input method may be, such as touch, controller, or keyboard and mouse. Developers targeting the Apple platform can now develop for iPad, iPhone, Mac, and Apple TV simultaneously. This may make the Apple platform more attractive to game developers as they will have access to a far larger market share than on macOS or iOS alone.

Although it is not possible to develop games for Apple devices on Windows entirely, since a Mac is still needed to sign software and for testing, the availability of gaming-oriented Apple developer tools for Windows marks a significant step in gaming on Apple devices.

As Apple moves the Mac to custom silicon, where it will no longer support Boot Camp, it is interesting that Apple is releasing developer tools specifically for gaming with regards to Windows. Seeing that these new developer tools allow Windows games to be compiled into Metal for Apple platforms, rather than being completely rebuilt, it should now be easier for developers to port native PC games and AAA titles to the Mac.

Update: Max Tech also has a good video covering the topic:

Article Link: Metal Developer Tools on Windows Offer New Gaming Opportunities

 

[robinp]

Apple game console incoming? All that controller / keyboard support. Apple silicon with GPUs surely competing / surpassing the current generation consoles. Seems kind of inevitable that the Apple TV becomes a serious gaming platform.

 

[mi7chy]

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

 

[JimmyBanks6]

Apple game console incoming? All that controller / keyboard support. Apple silicon with GPUs surely competing / surpassing the current generation consoles. Seems kind of inevitable that the Apple TV becomes a serious gaming platform.

What's your definition of "serious"?

/edit/ genuine question, not inflammatory, what do you think would take it from casual to serious is what im wondering.

 

[Merode]

If you've developed anything with low level graphics API, you'll know compiling shaders is just tiny piece of whole story. Without full Metal support for Windows or Linux these tools will be useless.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Apple game console incoming? All that controller / keyboard support. Apple silicon with GPUs surely competing / surpassing the current generation consoles. Seems kind of inevitable that the Apple TV becomes a serious gaming platform.

PS5/XBox One 2020 are RDNA 2.0 based GPUs. Nothing Apple will do will match that level. They are both custom AMD SoC with Zen 2/RDNA 2.0 designs.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

If you've developed anything with low level graphics API, you'll know compiling shaders is just tiny piece of whole story. Without full Metal support for Windows or Linux these tools will be useless.

Not entirely true. Still have to test the compiled executable on a Mac, but at least this would let developers who develop on Windows for Windows, have an easier time targeting the Mac, and being able to benefit from the enhanced performance offered by Metal. If you wanted to target macOS from Windows previously, you'd invariably have to use OpenGL.

 

[Kagio]

This is from Max Tech youtube channel

 

[Merode]

Not entirely true. Still have to test the compiled executable on a Mac, but at least this would let developers who develop on Windows for Windows, have an easier time targeting the Mac, and being able to benefit from the enhanced performance offered by Metal. If you wanted to target macOS from Windows previously, you'd invariably have to use OpenGL.

And that's my point. The article states you can only compile shaders. That's just one piece of everything you've gotta do. So you still cannot target Metal from Windows and nobody sane is going to setup Windows machine just to compile Metal shaders.

It's a crude comparison but: you want to build houses and these tools allow Windows users to paint walls. You still need Mac for everything else so why bother?

 

[robinp]

PS5/XBox One 2020 are RDNA 2.0 based GPUs. Nothing Apple will do will match that level. They are both custom AMD SoC with Zen 2/RDNA 2.0 designs.

I did say current generation. Not next gen.

And I believe the A12x/z competes with the xBox one (not X) and the PS4. But that’s basically 2 years old and running in a thermally constrained tablet.

 

[groove-agent]

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

Are you surprised though?

Especially after the Apple Silicon announcement, you know they're going to do things their way.

That aside, it's great to see Apple taking gaming seriously. I don't know how many AAA titles we'll see, but definitely a diverse set of smaller games that you'd typically find for the phone/ iPad.

I wonder if they'll support eGPUs on ARM macs?

 

[robinp]

What's your definition of "serious"?

/edit/ genuine question, not inflammatory, what do you think would take it from casual to serious is what im wondering.

It feels like the appletv treats gaming as a bit of a hobby right now. If the next one has performance that beats the current gen systems and has a few genuinely excellent exclusive titles; games that have fully developed stories and last 40+ hours then I think it would become a ‘serious’ gaming platform. Ie, one that people might buy simply or primarily for the games.

No one (hardly anyone?) buys the current appletv as a gaming device.

 

[endlessike]

Apple game console incoming? All that controller / keyboard support. Apple silicon with GPUs surely competing / surpassing the current generation consoles. Seems kind of inevitable that the Apple TV becomes a serious gaming platform.

Depends on your definition of serious, I suppose.

 

[Double-A]

FINALLY! Mac fans who also want to venture into ”PC gaming” should not be forced to purchase a Mac AND a gaming PC!

 

[mingistech]

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

Metal provides a 10 times increase in draw calls compared to OpenGL ES 3,1 while Vulkan provides a 3.5 times increase in draw calls compared to OpenGL ES 3,1.

Essentially Metal is faster.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

And that's my point. The article states you can only compile shaders. That's just one piece of everything you've gotta do. So you still cannot target Metal from Windows and nobody sane is going to setup Windows machine just to compile Metal shaders.

It's a crude comparison but: you want to build houses and these tools allow Windows users to paint walls. You still need Mac for everything else so why bother?

Developers generally have very customized development environments which are difficult to copy from platform to platform. I'm speaking from experience here when I say that devs generally prefer to stick to their preferred platform whenever possible. Simply switching to a Mac for development isn't a simple task for a dev who isn't used to it. If they can do their entire jobs from one platform, then copy the executable over and test (all of which can easily be scripted), it's definitely more convenient and preferable to do so.

 

[topdrawer]

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

why not adopt C# instead of swift? why move to sillicon? why be anything other than a PC? plus lazy game developers don't need to learn another anything. most use unity or unreal which spits out metal games automagically. most will never make or touch custom shaders

 

[simonmet]

Apple has to have the hardware to entice development. If they do, developers will put in the effort. If not, they won’t.

I sincerely hope the switch to ARM will support much better graphics.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

If Apple wants to get seen as a serious game platform, they'll need to pay for (or develop) compelling exclusives.

I don't see Apple going after the "mature" exclusives of the PlayStation and Xbox... so that'd mean we'll see them competing with Nintendo. This could be interesting... I feel like it's been a long time since we saw serious competition for Nintendo's franchises... Sonic and Megaman became crap while Spyro, Crash, Gex, Epic Mickey, etc all just kind of vanished.

 

[ridgero]

Would have been nice if you at least mentioned „Max Tech“ in the article.

 

[Madhatter32]

This could be the canary in the coal mine for a major move into gaming. Let's hope as it would be a good thing Apple to do.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Apple game console incoming? All that controller / keyboard support. Apple silicon with GPUs surely competing / surpassing the current generation consoles. Seems kind of inevitable that the Apple TV becomes a serious gaming platform.

The return of Pippin

Nothing Apple does which ends up a failure or a concept is ever forgotten. They come back at it and rethink it, modernize it:

1. Newton: Michael Tchao
- Poof when deleting words (ended up in OS X 10.1 - 10.6 when removing items from the dock).
- Scribble, we now see it with iPadOS 14 with pencil input. I'm sure accessibility support allowed minimal features of this in OS X for some time though.

2. The Navigator Concept: 1985!!
- AI (Voice Direction, Announcement of inbound calls, scheduling etc) = Siri
- Tablet form Factor with video conferencing camera = iPad & iPad Pro
- Wireless networking = 802.11b/g/a/ac/ax and LTE/5G

3. The Pippin
- Gaming console that shipped in the UK with 1 disc/program which was for art direction, pretty useless.
- We're not seeing in in iOS, iPadOS, TVOS with game controller support and App Store Games. Digital distribution/payment/subscriptions/bundles ... and a much much wide range of games to appeal to various segments of games for the light gamer. When we see more hard core games ... like COD etc THEN we know we're here!

This ... programming in Metal on Windows ... is Epic. Since the chipset is soon to be completely unified across all Apple's platforms ... now we'll see some serious integration.

PS: I"m hoping to see some unique implementation for games and sound for the HomePod (as a pair) like Innescou is doing with AirPods Pro this fall with 360 Audio!

 

[ruka.snow]

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

Why should developers have to learn Vulkan when we already know DX12 and Metal? Vulkan was very late to the party and well after Metal was developed and shipping.

 

[konqerror]

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

Because OpenGL failed.

First, it became "write once debug everywhere". Everybody's implementation had different bugs made worse with different driver versions. You'd have to deal with differences and bugs on the same hardware across operating systems, and on the same operating system across different vendors.

Even Google gave up on OpenGL; Chrome translates all its OpenGL ES/WebGL into DirectX on Windows.

Second, because everything was implemented as a ton of different extensions, often proprietary, and no extensions were consistently available, causing coding to the lowest common denominator. DirectX and Metal have set feature levels that guarantee a bundle of capabilities.

Third, Khronos is a giant committee with politics and special interests. This is what happened with OpenCL. Apple gave it to them and they took it in a completely different direction, which ultimately nobody really cared about and certainly failed to compete against CUDA.

By being a closed standard, DirectX and Metal ensure a consistent API and minimal bugs across different hardware and different platforms. Look at games today, DirectX is far preferred on desktop over Vulkan.

 

[Merode]

Metal provides a 10 times increase in draw calls compared to OpenGL ES 3,1 while Vulkan provides a 3.5 times increase in draw calls compared to OpenGL ES 3,1.

Essentially Metal is faster.

You know OpenGL is a standard and it is up to each developer/manufacturer to implement it? That's why a lot of games that have native macOS clients perform much worse on macOS than in Boot Camp. Sometimes Windows (Boot Camp) client is even up to twice as fast (FPS).

What I'm getting at - if Apple is comparing Metal to its own OpenGL implementation then of course it's going to be A LOT faster. You know why? Because Apple's implementation of OpenGL was lackluster since its conception. That's why this comparison is the way it is - Vulkan is compared to OpenGL on Android. It's not apples to apples comparison.

In essence Vulkan, Metal and DirectX 12 should perform equally as good because they function very similarly. Vulkan has richer feature set than Metal at the moment but Metal is catching up quickly. However in reality Metal performance leaves much to be desired. There's no way to compare those two APIs fairly because there's no Vulkan for macOS (MoltenVK is just a wrapper around Metal). However there are games with native clients on macOS that use Metal renderer (World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2) and in Boot Camp they still perform much better on DirectX (11 and 12).

I like Apple but let's be honest for a minute. Their graphics performance was lackluster for decades now and it's not going to change overnight. They no longer compare themselves to PCs like in 90's and early 00's. They compare their devices to previous generations of their devices.