4 ms·

The weird insistence on supporting only Metal and nothing outside of Apple's own bubble is entirely Apple's own doing.

by pornel 5y ago

sirwhinesalot 5y ago
I agree, but that is still something we need to take into account when comparing the hardware. Imagine if Arm Windows gets popular and it somehow has great drivers for this GPU (unlikely, but humor me here). Then the actual power of the hardware would be a lot more relevant for gaming related benchmarks.
- darkwater 5y ago
  You mean that we should take into account how actually complicated is to get software that fully support the hardware into account for HW comparisons where a type of HW can only run with a specific OS?
  - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
    No, I mean that's not relevant to compare what the hardware can do. It's like how the PS3 was super hard to program but in the end it was producing more impressive results than the Xbox360. This was not a surprising result, it was to be expected from the hardware. It's not that different from what is happening here, benchmarks running on x86 emulation on engines running compatibility layers for Metal are not representative of the hardware.
    - darkwater 5y ago
      With the difference that Apple HW performance might be "good enough" for 3rd party software vendors if they take into account the extra development burden for the platform. Anyway some of those benchmarks were already using Metal and are still behind.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Who cares about hardware you can't utilize? Its just a piece of silicon with potentially any performance imaginable. What you can do with it, now, matters. If this changes in some theoretical future, well we re-evaluate performance claims and stats. Nobody bothers to guess what's the potential of some new graphic card once all drivers, games, OS etc are fully tweaked and optimized. You decide on performance now.
  - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
    You can already use it now if you're targeting the platform. It's not the platform provider's problem if you're using a compatibility layer, that was your choice. Well, from a development POV at least, from a user POV, if your tools are using the compatibility layer, there is not much you can do. We knew this would happen for everything using Rosetta, that's just part of transitioning to a new CPU architecture. For Vulkan vs Metal that's self-inflicted on Apple's part.
weberer 5y ago
>The weird insistence Well it worked for Microsoft
- Macha 5y ago
  To be fair, while they promoted DirectX, Microsoft have provided support for using OpenGL in Windows[1] (while the docs here are dated 2019, the porting guide from IRIS GL, OpenGL's early 90s predecessor, indicates they're actually much older) 1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/opengl/porting-applications-from-iris-gl https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/opengl/portin...
  - tpush 5y ago
    Microsoft supported OpenGL prior to developing Direct3D. As soon as that got into good enough shape to supplant OpenGL, OpenGL got dropped. These days you're better off using OpenGL via ANGLE, built on top of Direct3D. That will probably also happen analogously on Apple's platform with Metal, so I don't quite get the kvetching about Apple deprecating OpenGL. As if it matters whether Apple ships an OpenGL implementation as part of the OS or purely as a normal user space library.

The weird insistence on supporting only Metal and nothing outside of Apple's own bubble is entirely Apple's own doing.

by pornel 5y ago

The weird insistence on supporting only Metal and nothing outside of Apple's own bubble is entirely Apple's own doing.

I agree, but that is still something we need to take into account when comparing the hardware. Imagine if Arm Windows gets popular and it somehow has great drivers for this GPU (unlikely, but humor me here). Then the actual power of the hardware would be a lot more relevant for gaming related benchmarks.

darkwater 5y ago
You mean that we should take into account how actually complicated is to get software that fully support the hardware into account for HW comparisons where a type of HW can only run with a specific OS?
- sirwhinesalot 5y ago
  No, I mean that's not relevant to compare what the hardware can do. It's like how the PS3 was super hard to program but in the end it was producing more impressive results than the Xbox360. This was not a surprising result, it was to be expected from the hardware. It's not that different from what is happening here, benchmarks running on x86 emulation on engines running compatibility layers for Metal are not representative of the hardware.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    With the difference that Apple HW performance might be "good enough" for 3rd party software vendors if they take into account the extra development burden for the platform. Anyway some of those benchmarks were already using Metal and are still behind.
saiya-jin 5y ago
Who cares about hardware you can't utilize? Its just a piece of silicon with potentially any performance imaginable. What you can do with it, now, matters. If this changes in some theoretical future, well we re-evaluate performance claims and stats. Nobody bothers to guess what's the potential of some new graphic card once all drivers, games, OS etc are fully tweaked and optimized. You decide on performance now.
- sirwhinesalot 5y ago
  You can already use it now if you're targeting the platform. It's not the platform provider's problem if you're using a compatibility layer, that was your choice. Well, from a development POV at least, from a user POV, if your tools are using the compatibility layer, there is not much you can do. We knew this would happen for everything using Rosetta, that's just part of transitioning to a new CPU architecture. For Vulkan vs Metal that's self-inflicted on Apple's part.

weberer 5y ago

>The weird insistence Well it worked for Microsoft

Macha 5y ago
To be fair, while they promoted DirectX, Microsoft have provided support for using OpenGL in Windows[1] (while the docs here are dated 2019, the porting guide from IRIS GL, OpenGL's early 90s predecessor, indicates they're actually much older) 1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/opengl/porting-applications-from-iris-gl https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/opengl/portin...
- tpush 5y ago
  Microsoft supported OpenGL prior to developing Direct3D. As soon as that got into good enough shape to supplant OpenGL, OpenGL got dropped. These days you're better off using OpenGL via ANGLE, built on top of Direct3D. That will probably also happen analogously on Apple's platform with Metal, so I don't quite get the kvetching about Apple deprecating OpenGL. As if it matters whether Apple ships an OpenGL implementation as part of the OS or purely as a normal user space library.