OS X "El Capitan" Aims To Offer Better Performance, Metal Graphics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OS X "El Capitan" Aims To Offer Better Performance, Metal Graphics

With Apple's WWDC event this week, they've revealed OS X 10.11 as being codenamed El Capitan. Here's some details about Apple's OS that will be competing this year with the likes of Windows 10, Fedora 23, and Ubuntu 15.10...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OS-X-10.11-El-Capitan-Perf

[johnc]

ooof. I figured Metal would be coming to the desktop eventually. Which means games too, of course.

It seems like we were moving towards "everybody should use OpenGL to target all the platforms in one shot" to "every platform will have its own API".

[Ancurio]

Ohh that's very interesting. I am really curious how they beat Metal, an API explicitly designed for shared-memory GPU systems, to work on desktops. Unless they actually adapted (and thus changed) the buffer API, this smells like a big bucket of hackery.

[xeekei]

It saddens me that Apple are going with their own API instead of Vulkan.

[dragorth]

Ohh that's very interesting. I am really curious how they beat Metal, an API explicitly designed for shared-memory GPU systems, to work on desktops. Unless they actually adapted (and thus changed) the buffer API, this smells like a big bucket of hackery.

So, we know that Apple has been a part of the Vulkan group. I wonder if they took design cues from Vulkan on how to port a one architecture api to become something that works on multiple GPU architectures?

[dungeon]

It saddens me that Apple are going with their own API instead of Vulkan.

Pushing exclusive APis, exclusive games, exclusive xyz... is only what is worth on those platforms.

What linux has as exclusive is GNU

[utack]

It saddens me that Apple are going with their own API instead of Vulkan.

OpenGl was an excellent example of how they failed to use a standard they did not design, it makes sense for them to not even try to support Vulkan, because they would fail as well.

[Ancurio]

So, we know that Apple has been a part of the Vulkan group. I wonder if they took design cues from Vulkan on how to port a one architecture api to become something that works on multiple GPU architectures?

You don't need "design cues" for that. The matter of the fact is simply that on dedicated cards there are memory pools which are not visible to the CPU, so you need auxiliary so called "staging buffers" to get data into them.

[eydee]

Metal is a platform exclusive API on a platform where the number of gamers is very low. Well, good luck, Apple...

[klaphark]

Metal is a platform exclusive API on a platform where the number of gamers is very low. Well, good luck, Apple...

Don't forget that Metal is also available on mobile devices with Apple A7 soc or newer so the number of gamers is increasing rapidly. This development is pretty sad to be honest because it reduces the changes for Vulkan to become a relevant 3D API or gain any traction.

The only party I can currently think of that could benefit from Vulkan is Valve, other (big) players role their own platform specific API (Microsoft, Apple) or support all of them (Unity 3D, Unreal) so they won't care if Vulkan succeeds or fails. Vulkan may technically be better than OpenGL but with a shrinking userbase it's pretty much off to a false start I guess .