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An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

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Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#181

Post by bluGill »

BirAdam wrote: post #171
duxup wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People talk about Apple prices being higher but the longevity of their devices really erases that price difference for me. I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well, I’ve had numerous Android devices die in that timeframe, slow to a crawl, or at best their performance is erratic.

I am not so sure. I had a Pentium4 eMachine that made it all the way to around 2012. The same kind of life for my first Athlon64 machine from the same company. In both cases, the machines ran Linux, and they still work today. They were only retired because no meaningful software could run on them any longer. My PowerBook G4 got no where near that longevity, and owners of late era Intel MacBooks are probably going to…

Those machines should have been retired long ago because modern machines use much less power. (the Pentium4 was really bad) Of course there is a difference between a machine that you turn on for an hour once a week and a machine you leave on 24x7. The later use would pay for a new computer in just a few years just from savings on the electric bill (assuming same workload, if you then load the new computer with more things to do you can't see that)

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#182

Post by almostgotcaught »

user_7832 wrote: post #161
david-gpu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former insider, this is NOT remotely how I would describe reality. I have signed NDAs and don't feel comfortable going into any detail, other than saying that there is a TON going on inside GPUs that is not "basically all emulated".

Maybe a tall ask, but have you considered writing down all your experiences into a book, and release it after all NDAs expire? I’d love to read more about low level hardware and the behind the scenes stuff involved. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of good stories.

> I’d love to read more about low level hardware and the behind the scenes stuff involved. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of good stories.

I don't know why you think there's anything resembling "good stories" (I don't even know what would constitute a good story - swash buckling adventures?). It's just grimy-ass runtime/driver/firmware code interfacing with hardware features/flaws.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#183

Post by kllrnohj »

boulos wrote: post #102
musictubes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the hardware for ray tracing be used for anything else? Ray tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any non graphics use?

You'll have to see what the instruction set / features are capable of, but most likely the "hardware ray tracing" support means it can do ray-BVH and ray-triangle intersection in hardware. You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The other parts of ray tracing like shading and so on, are usually just done on the general compute.

> You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection.

The problem with doing so, though, and with GPU physics in general is that it's too high latency to incorporate effectively into a typical game loop. It'll work fine for things that don't impact the world, like particle simulations or hair/cloth physics, but for anything interactive the latency cost tends to kill it. That and also the GPU is usually the visual bottleneck anyway so having it spend power on stuff the half-idle CPU could do adequately isn't a good use of resources.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#184

Post by opan »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #176
duxup wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People talk about Apple prices being higher but the longevity of their devices really erases that price difference for me. I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well, I’ve had numerous Android devices die in that timeframe, slow to a crawl, or at best their performance is erratic.

I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real “bang for your buck” computer IMO

With soldered RAM and storage it seems quite risky to get the lowest spec version of any new Mac, so I don't see much point in discussing the entry-level price point. Do they still start at 8GB? I recall hearing that negatively impacted the SSD's performance significantly and people were recommending 16GB minimum for M1 stuff.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#185

Post by adrian_b »

HeuristicsCG wrote: post #114
comex wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet one of the fancy new features being advertised in recent years (in multiple APIs including Metal) is support for mesh shaders – which seem to have a lot in common with geometry shaders, including the output ordering property that that post blames for geometry shaders’ bad performance. I’m not a graphics programmer myself, but this makes me suspect there’s more to the story.

if your hardware supports mesh shaders properly, it won't be very hard for it to also support these other features emulated in software (geometry shaders, tessellation, lines etc). But mesh shaders are fairly new, will take a few years for the hardware and software to adapt.

They are fairly new at the other GPU makers, but the NVIDIA GPUs have them starting with Turing, 6 years ago.

AMD GPUs have them starting with RDNA 2.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#186

Post by cdelsolar »

opan wrote: post #184
Forgeties79 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real “bang for your buck” computer IMO

With soldered RAM and storage it seems quite risky to get the lowest spec version of any new Mac, so I don't see much point in discussing the entry-level price point. Do they still start at 8GB? I recall hearing that negatively impacted the SSD's performance significantly and people were recommending 16GB minimum for M1 stuff.

I have an 8GB M1 MacBook Pro and it’s the perfect computer. I always have lots of tabs and Docker open etc. It works great. I want to upgrade at some point but probably don’t need to anytime soon.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#187

Post by dadbod80 »

opan wrote: post #184
Forgeties79 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real “bang for your buck” computer IMO

With soldered RAM and storage it seems quite risky to get the lowest spec version of any new Mac, so I don't see much point in discussing the entry-level price point. Do they still start at 8GB? I recall hearing that negatively impacted the SSD's performance significantly and people were recommending 16GB minimum for M1 stuff.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/30/apple-8gb-16gb-ram-mac/

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#188

Post by Neonlicht »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142
whitehexagon wrote: post #128

What I really respect is the dedication to completing support for the M1/M2. Too many projects get dropped the moment the next shiny ray-traced toy comes along. I know this type of work can be challenging to say the least. My own dabble with Zig and Pinephone hardware drivers reminded me of some of the pain of poorly documented hardware, but what a reward when it works. My own M1 was only purchased because of this pr…

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

Using a laptop with 8gb RAM for a decade is an exercise in frustration

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#189

Post by bzzzt »

Neonlicht wrote: post #188
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

Using a laptop with 8gb RAM for a decade is an exercise in frustration

Only if you insist on running software that needs more RAM, in which case you shouldn't have bought it.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#190

Post by TigerAndDragonB »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #142
whitehexagon wrote: post #128

What I really respect is the dedication to completing support for the M1/M2. Too many projects get dropped the moment the next shiny ray-traced toy comes along. I know this type of work can be challenging to say the least. My own dabble with Zig and Pinephone hardware drivers reminded me of some of the pain of poorly documented hardware, but what a reward when it works. My own M1 was only purchased because of this pr…

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community. Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going o…

> ...how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last...

This is no longer true for me. I've been an Apple fan since the Apple ][ days, and reluctantly left the ecosystem last year. The hardware walled garden with soldered-on components and components tied down to specific units for ostensible privacy and security reasons (I don't buy those reasons), combined with the steadily degrading OS polish in fine attention to detail, for me personally, meant I could no longer justify the cognitive load to continue with a Mac laptop as my daily driver. While others might point to a cost or/or value differential, I'm in the highly privileged position to be insensitive to those factors.

Last straw was an board-soldered SSD that quit well before I was willing to upgrade, and even Louis Rossman's shop said it would cost way more to desolder and solder a new one on than the entire laptop is worth. Bought a Framework the same day, when it arrived I restored my data files to it and been running it as my daily driver ever since. The Mac laptop is still sitting here, as I keep hoping to figure out when to find time to develop my wave soldering skills to try my hand at saving it from the landfill, or break down and unsustainably pay for the repair (I do what I can to avoid perpetuating dark patterns, but it is a Sisyphean effort).

I found myself in a position of having to think increasingly more about working around the Mac ecosystem instead of working invisibly within it (like a fish in water not having to think about water), that it no longer made sense to stick with it. It has definitively lost the "It Just Works" polish that bound me so tightly to the ecosystem in the past. I see no functional difference in my daily work patterns using a Mac laptop versus a Framework running Fedora.

To be sure, there are a lot of areas I have to work around on the Framework-Fedora daily driver, but for my personal work patterns, in my personal needs, I evaluated them to be roughly the same amount of time and cognitive load I spent on the Mac. Maybe Framework-Fedora is slightly worse, but close enough that I'd rather throw my hat into the more open ring than the increasingly closed walled garden Apple's direction definitely is taking us, that does not align with my vision for our computing future. It does not hurt that experimenting with local LLM's and various DevOps tooling for my work's Linux-based infrastructure is way easier and frictionless on Fedora for me, though YMMV for certain. It has already been and will be an interesting journey, it has been fun so far and brought back some fond memories of my early Apple ][, Macintosh 128K, and Mac OS X days.

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