ripclaw
Unless you have way too much development resources on your hand, then you could start to build three versions for each platform. But that's going to be a pain to support.

If Apple wasn't dilettantish with their OpenGL implementation then you have a very good point, alas Metal is the new cash crop and never will OpenGL be spoken of again.

Metal vs. OpenGL ES on iOS:

http://anandtech.com/show/9223/gfxbench-3-metal-ios [anandtech.com]

While the API overhead test shows huge gains, actual usage tests shows a more modest 5-10% improvement. However, this isn't likely a true comparison, since in order to take full advantage of Metal (and DX12, Vulkan), you really have to rework how the entire scene draws. Simply porting the calls over doesn't really gain much, and I suspect that's why that particular benchmark isn't showing larger gains.

Was browsing the Xcode docs & noticed Metal allows for OGL fall back by default. Apparently Apple has planned already for Metal to be the top standard for OSX future releases. Maybe this is why SideFX is getting such poor support from Apple regarding OGL. It appears that Apple wishes for all their developers to adopt their new language. Perhaps if SideFX could implement just a taste of Metal to provide a solution to Apple's worst OGL hiccups then they'd start getting outstanding support from Apple, because I'd doubt Apple would allow failure of their new coders & admit any shame after shoveling Metal down their developers throats! :idea:

kwiknip .
" because I'd doubt Apple would allow failure of their new coders & admit any shame after shoveling Metal down their developers throats!"

Sorry about that last part, I just recalled when Apple abandoned QDraw3D for OGL. ops:

sounds cool

twod

Chronon
Jack Greasley from The Foundry revealed that they've already implemented Metal within Modo, and the process took four weeks.

On the other hand, Apple's OpenGL implementation is so buggy that it might actually be less work to have a Metal port. At this point, I'm far more interested in seeing a robust graphics API on OSX - then we can talk performance

I think that was the same line of thinking at the Foundry. The amount of headaches OGL on OSX causes is already a drain on resources (and moral probably).

Wow, the min specs for H14 on OSX is 10.10.2.. I think they were 10.8 at launch. I found i needed 10.9.5 to be stable, and was encouraged by SESI to go to 10.10.

I wonder if the OpenGL group could actually put pressure on Apple to do the task they are meant to do…

wishful thinking?

jordibares
I wonder if the OpenGL group could actually put pressure on Apple to do the task they are meant to do…

wishful thinking?

This is a question for the String Theory Parallel/Multiverses theory crowd :twisted:

ARS article on OpenGL vs. Metal on OSX:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/10/metal-performance-in-os-x-el-capitan-sometimes-great-often-mixed/ [arstechnica.com]

Perhaps v2 of metal will be the OpenGL killer… :roll:

MetalGL for OSX looks interesting :idea:
https://metalgl.com/ [metalgl.com]

Seems great, i wonder why it's not initiated by Apple

kwiknip .
MetalGL for OSX looks interesting :idea:
https://metalgl.com/ [metalgl.com]

Yeah, too bad it's based on OpenGL ES 2.0 (stripped down version of GL3) and not OpenGL 3.3/4.1 though. GL-ES 2 lacks geometry shaders, which makes it a no-go for Houdini.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR7U1HIhxfA [youtube.com]

twod
ARS article on OpenGL vs. Metal on OSX:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/10/metal-performance-in-os-x-el-capitan-sometimes-great-often-mixed/ [arstechnica.com]

Seems unfortuante they did not test a single AMD card considering the amount of mac hardware where AMD is the only option.

The one plus of Metal, if it is basically no better but also no worse than openGL performance-wise is that it is less work to use? At least I though that was one of the selling points of Metal - that OSX openGL was/is a PITA to work with and maintain. I can't speak to if that is actually true or not.

The OpenGL API itself is fine to work with (a bit crufty, but it's all wrapped up in friendly object classes in our codebase, so I basically never deal with GL calls directly when working with mid-to-high level graphics code).

It's the OpenGL implementation, or the driver underneath, that causes the problems. Given that, I'm not sure if Metal would be any better than GL once it's pushed the way we're pushing OpenGL. I figured that going from legacy GL in H13 to core profile GL in H14 would give us much better stability on OSX, and that just didn't happen as much as we'd hoped. So I'm a bit wary of jumping APIs yet again to solve stability issues.

And yes, it's somewhat unfortunate that ARS only tested Intel GPUs in that comparison.

Looking forward, does Metal have all the features of OpenGl 4.5+?

H15 is performing really well on osX, and the viewport looks great, but is unfortunately limited to GL4.1.

https://moltengl.com/metalvk/ [moltengl.com]

MetalVK is an implementation of Vulkan that runs on Apple's Metal graphics framework. With MetalVK, you get the performance benefits and added debugging and performance tuning capabilities of the Metal framework on iOS and OS X, while maintaining compliance with an open, industry-standard, next-generation, high-performance graphics API. By building your application or game using the Vulkan API, you can run your modern graphics application or game unchanged across an entire industry of platforms and development tools.

…you unfortunately get the limitations of the Metal framework on iOS and OSX as well, which is the lack of Geometry and Tessellation shaders in GL3 and GL4. I guess GL2 shaders are good enough for Apple (Vertex-Fragment), though not good enough to run Houdini.

Vulkan itself doesn't have the same limitation - Tessellation and Geometry shaders are fully present, though transform feedback is currently missing in Vulkan 1.0 (which we use for selecting components).

Hi,
About Viewport performance on OSX.
Sorry if it's a little of thread but on my early tests with H15 on OSX I have the impression that selecting create a new set of “OpenGL geometry” on top of the unselected one causing a fps drop

Is that a result of the OpenGL implementation on OSX?