Question Apple getting serious about gaming with Metal 3

[igor_kavinski]

MetalFX Upscaling will bring DLSS-like image reconstruction to games on MacOS

Apple wants triple-A gaming back, and image reconstruction could get them there.

arstechnica.com

To celebrate this Metal 3 API milestone, Apple confirmed that popular and processing-intensive games Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky will come to macOS "later this year."

I knew those GPU cores wouldn't just sit idle. Not sure if Metal 3 is meant solely for M2 or if it supports the M1 series too. Clarification from Apple would have been nice.

I suppose later this year means M2 MBP 16 will be unveiled at that point too.

 

[igor_kavinski]

They will project their infamous reality distortion field on game developers, showing them how easy and cool it is to develop using Metal 3. Same thing that happened with the App Store. At least for big publishers, it shouldn't be that much of an issue to have a small team of Metal 3 developers or even outsource the port to some studio with Metal 3 experience.

 

[NTMBK]

Arent they going to need to build their own version of directX? Could they license that from MS? I dont see devs wanting to fragment the API market anymore than they already have.

Metal is their equivalent to DirectX 12.

 

[biostud]

But what kind of gaming?

I don't forsee competitive gamers bringing the Mac, in a near future.

But sure some casual gaming might gain some traction.

 

[Tup3x]

Arent they going to need to build their own version of directX? Could they license that from MS? I dont see devs wanting to fragment the API market anymore than they already have.

All they'd need to do is to support Vulkan and things would be very straight forward.

 

[uclaLabrat]

I also think the closed environment is going to seriously inhibit gaming. Do you have the option of swapping parts and upgrading gpus whenever? Gonna be interesting.

 

[Ajay]

I also think the closed environment is going to seriously inhibit gaming. Do you have the option of swapping parts and upgrading gpus whenever? Gonna be interesting.

Not with the M-series Macs. Maybe later, who knows (depends on if some GPU maker writes ARM drivers - then they *might* be adaptable to MacOS with a reasonable amount of work).

 

[gdansk]

They could use wine Direct3D implementations and vkd3d. But since it's Apple they don't support Vulkan and avoid GPL code like the plague. If they cared about getting games ported to MacOS that's part of the strategy.

But they'll settle for iOS games because that's the easy path. But it's not a good experience. Although I just checked and most the iOS games I have aren't available on my M1P laptop.

 

[Dribble]

Yeah no thanks. I don't want my perception of reality going through any corporation's control.

Is corporate control possible, yes, but no more so then using your phone or your pc.

Beyond that it is like using a smart phone, which everyone already does, only with a more powerful and intuitive user interface which opens up new uses.
e.g. right now I can look at any item I want to buy in a shop, then get on my phone too google it for reviews, price elsewhere, etc. In the future that info will be available just by looking at it.
Meet someone you haven't seen in years and have forgotten their name - you could go to your phone, search for old photo's, etc. Eventually you will probably find it. With AR it'll just recognise them, pop up their name, when you last met them, what their job is, etc on your smart glasses.
If something you own has broken, you can get on your phone, and google for the video on how to take it apart, then go back and copy the instructions, or with AR you can wear your smart glasses and effectively have the instructions super imposed onto the real item in your view - e.g. you see the screws you need to remove highlighted, and instructions on which way to unscrew them, how to remove the panel, etc.
You are out and the kid is trying to use the washing machine, you can effectively draw in virtual chalk a circle around the button he needs to press in his vision (so the chalk stays around the button as they move around).
If you are shopping for clothes or decorations or something that you really want to see in place then with AR you can see the new tv hung on your wall, you can look into a virtual mirror and see yourself wearing the clothes you want to buy.

You can hate all you want but just like the world has become dependent on smart phones, so it will become dependent on ar glasses. The market will be as big as the smart phone one.

 

[NTMBK]

Is corporate control possible, yes, but no more so then using your phone or your pc.

Beyond that it is like using a smart phone, which everyone already does, only with a more powerful and intuitive user interface which opens up new uses.
e.g. right now I can look at any item I want to buy in a shop, then get on my phone too google it for reviews, price elsewhere, etc. In the future that info will be available just by looking at it.
Meet someone you haven't seen in years and have forgotten their name - you could go to your phone, search for old photo's, etc. Eventually you will probably find it. With AR it'll just recognise them, pop up their name, when you last met them, what their job is, etc on your smart glasses.
If something you own has broken, you can get on your phone, and google for the video on how to take it apart, then go back and copy the instructions, or with AR you can wear your smart glasses and effectively have the instructions super imposed onto the real item in your view - e.g. you see the screws you need to remove highlighted, and instructions on which way to unscrew them, how to remove the panel, etc.
You are out and the kid is trying to use the washing machine, you can effectively draw in virtual chalk a circle around the button he needs to press in his vision (so the chalk stays around the button as they move around).
If you are shopping for clothes or decorations or something that you really want to see in place then with AR you can see the new tv hung on your wall, you can look into a virtual mirror and see yourself wearing the clothes you want to buy.

You can hate all you want but just like the world has become dependent on smart phones, so it will become dependent on ar glasses. The market will be as big as the smart phone one.

Nah, still not going to use them.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Is corporate control possible, yes, but no more so then using your phone or your pc.

Beyond that it is like using a smart phone, which everyone already does, only with a more powerful and intuitive user interface which opens up new uses.
e.g. right now I can look at any item I want to buy in a shop, then get on my phone too google it for reviews, price elsewhere, etc. In the future that info will be available just by looking at it.
Meet someone you haven't seen in years and have forgotten their name - you could go to your phone, search for old photo's, etc. Eventually you will probably find it. With AR it'll just recognise them, pop up their name, when you last met them, what their job is, etc on your smart glasses.
If something you own has broken, you can get on your phone, and google for the video on how to take it apart, then go back and copy the instructions, or with AR you can wear your smart glasses and effectively have the instructions super imposed onto the real item in your view - e.g. you see the screws you need to remove highlighted, and instructions on which way to unscrew them, how to remove the panel, etc.
You are out and the kid is trying to use the washing machine, you can effectively draw in virtual chalk a circle around the button he needs to press in his vision (so the chalk stays around the button as they move around).
If you are shopping for clothes or decorations or something that you really want to see in place then with AR you can see the new tv hung on your wall, you can look into a virtual mirror and see yourself wearing the clothes you want to buy.

You can hate all you want but just like the world has become dependent on smart phones, so it will become dependent on ar glasses. The market will be as big as the smart phone one.

-Remember Google glass? peperridge farm remembers.

I guess if anyone is going to convince a bunch of tools to wear some stupid looking glasses on their face it's going to be apple.

I don't deny that AR is a cool concept, but it's got a lot of time in the oven + requires a large cultural shift before it goes mainstream.

I think there are are a lot of awesome applications in industrial/work related settings, but apple has never been the sort of company to target blue collar industry over consumers.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I guess if anyone is going to convince a bunch of tools to wear some stupid looking glasses on their face it's going to be apple.

Love that!

 

[PingSpike]

Surely if Apple was getting serious about gaming they'd drop Metal for Vulkan.

Valve even picked up this baton Apple intentionally dropped and made that Vulkan to Metal shim. But knowing Apple they've found a way to ban it.

 

[SmoothSpoken]

Not with the M-series Macs. Maybe later, who knows (depends on if some GPU maker writes ARM drivers - then they *might* be adaptable to MacOS with a reasonable amount of work).

But I'm not even sure they can. Based on my limited research (will continue to do more), it looks like a vendor building a driver for macos would still need to use Metal and not Vulkan? Edit: when I say need, I mean that Apple would force Metal instead of Vulkan, although there may also be technical limitations?

Lunarg says you can use moltenvk but I've heard performance there is pretty poor, so any sort of translation layer from Metal -> Vk is probably a no-go.

On the flip side, if a vendor makes a high performance Metal driver, I'm curious how much work it would be to get games working on it (from, say, Vulkan). I don't see too many benchmarks comparing the two directly (other than this), but no perf numbers

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Anyone remember ATI's Close to Metal, which was supposed to be their GPGPU response to CUDA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_Metal

I wonder how much "Metal" is a derivative (if even in spirit) of that now long forgotten program given the relative closeness of the ATI/AMD group and Apple over the years.