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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

#231

Post by i000 »

helsinki wrote: post #229

Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy by running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a clever hack and a potential performance bottleneck. It makes me wonder about the long-term implications of such workarounds. Are we reaching a point where the complexity of bridging these gaps outweighs the benefits, especially when dealing with proprietary hardware designed to be a closed ecosyste…

What do you mean by “should the community do X” ? The Community is not some form of organisation with a mission and objective, it is a loose collection of individuals free to put their talents and explore intersts into whatever they please. You imply that this creative and inspiring work somehow stifles innovation and hurts users which is frankly absurd.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#232

Post by helsinki »

i000 wrote: post #231
helsinki wrote: post #229

Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy by running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a clever hack and a potential performance bottleneck. It makes me wonder about the long-term implications of such workarounds. Are we reaching a point where the complexity of bridging these gaps outweighs the benefits, especially when dealing with proprietary hardware designed to be a closed ecosyste…

What do you mean by “should the community do X” ? The Community is not some form of organisation with a mission and objective, it is a loose collection of individuals free to put their talents and explore intersts into whatever they please. You imply that this creative and inspiring work somehow stifles innovation and hurts users which is frankly absurd.

You should re-read the last paragraph of my comment and note that it is directed towards Apple.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#233

Post by i000 »

helsinki wrote: post #232
i000 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “should the community do X” ? The Community is not some form of organisation with a mission and objective, it is a loose collection of individuals free to put their talents and explore intersts into whatever they please. You imply that this creative and inspiring work somehow stifles innovation and hurts users which is frankly absurd.

You should re-read the last paragraph of my comment and note that it is directed towards Apple.

I said ‘imply’ because your response is not to an article on apples walled garden but work of open source developers. I agree with you 100% on criticizing apple but not on whether someone should put effort in making it more open.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#234

Post by GeekyBear »

helsinki wrote: post #229

Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy by running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a clever hack and a potential performance bottleneck. It makes me wonder about the long-term implications of such workarounds. Are we reaching a point where the complexity of bridging these gaps outweighs the benefits, especially when dealing with proprietary hardware designed to be a closed ecosyste…

> Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy by running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a clever hack and a potential performance bottleneck.

In her initial announcement, she mentions VM memory overhead as the reason that 16 Gigs of RAM will be the minimum requirement to emulate most Windows games.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#235

Post by bluedino »

ho_schi wrote: post #159
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underrated point, maybe it's aluminum unibody or more stable OS, but in my experience average MBP lifetime is meaningfully higher compared to a windows machine. My longest lasting windows machine was T400 Thinkpad which lasted 5 years before Core 2 Duo architecture stopped being able to keep up. It got replaced with HP Envy with great specs but made out of plastic which barely lasted 1.5 years before screen fell off…

ThinkPad X220 here. From late 2012 until late 2023 in service with Linux. It is still usable but finally replaced it by an X13 Gen3 AMD with Linux. The magnesium body is a bless and feels a lot better to the skin than aluminium. The HiDPI display is the biggest upgrade. The six row keyboard is sturdy but a downgrade from the seven row keyboard. I miss the notch to open the lid. It got worse with Gen4/5 which now have…

I never kept my ThinkPads around long because of the screens (which they have fixed, somewhere around the T450 timeframe.

The X220/230 had that godawful 1366x768 panel. A shame when the 13" Air at the time had a 1440x900 panel, which while it wasn't amazing with the viewing angles and colors, it was light years ahead of the screen in something like a T430.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#236

Post by bluedino »

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…

I have a personal M1 13" Air, and a work M3 16" Pro, and other than the silly 8GB limitation, I don't notice much of a difference in what I do when using the Air.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#237

Post by GeekyBear »

Twisell wrote: post #156
skoczko wrote: post #153

Since bringing modern OpenGL and Vulkan onto Apple Silicon is impossible without an emulation layer anyway, could, theoretically, a native Metal API for Linux be created? Or is Metal too ingrained in macOS SDKs? MoltenVK is attempting to solve the same issues Alyssa was talking about in her talk [1, the last comment on the issue is hers] [1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1524

Nothing is barring Apple from supporting Vulkan natively on MacOS. This is essentially the closing statement of Alyssa Rosenzweig´s talk. With Apple knowledge of internal documents they are the best positioned to produce an even better low level implementation. At this point the main blockroad is the opinionated point that Metal porting is the only official supported way to go. If Valve pull up a witch-crafted way to…

> Metal porting is the only official supported way to go.

Apple already provides its own native implementation of a DirectX to Metal emulation layer.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#238

Post by oorza »

helsinki wrote: post #229

Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy by running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a clever hack and a potential performance bottleneck. It makes me wonder about the long-term implications of such workarounds. Are we reaching a point where the complexity of bridging these gaps outweighs the benefits, especially when dealing with proprietary hardware designed to be a closed ecosyste…

I am genuinely curious if those barriers have technical justifications. There's a pretty stark difference (to me, at least) between ignoring standards in order to reinvent better wheels and intentionally diverging from standards to prevent compatibility.

It's a question of whether they're _not_ investing resources to maintain standard behavior or they are actively investing resources to diverge from it. If it's the former, I don't find any fault in it, personally speaking.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#239

Post by School-Cotton »

helsinki wrote: post #232
i000 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “should the community do X” ? The Community is not some form of organisation with a mission and objective, it is a loose collection of individuals free to put their talents and explore intersts into whatever they please. You imply that this creative and inspiring work somehow stifles innovation and hurts users which is frankly absurd.

You should re-read the last paragraph of my comment and note that it is directed towards Apple.

OP was talking about the middle paragraph of your comment, not the last one. I.e. the one in which you're talking about what "the community" should do, which is not really a meaningful question.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#240

Post by oorza »

bluedino wrote: post #236
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…

I have a personal M1 13" Air, and a work M3 16" Pro, and other than the silly 8GB limitation, I don't notice much of a difference in what I do when using the Air.

There's three buckets of performance in interactive software: so fast it doesn't matter to the user, slow enough the user notices but doesn't lose focus, and slow enough the user has time to lose focus. The lines are obviously different for each person, which is why some people feel that software is "fast enough" well before others do.

The jump from an i9 to an M1 moved a lot of tasks from group 3 into 2, some tasks from group 2 into group 1, and was the biggest perceived single-machine performance leap for me in my professional career. I have an M1 Max or Ultra on my work machine and an M3 Ultra in my personal machine - after two years of the work machine being so visibly faster, I caved and upgraded my personal. The M3 Ultra moves a handful of things from group 2 to group 1 but it's not enough to move anything out of group 3.

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