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Apple OS X El Capitan

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Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#13
post #9
post #5

> Metal is coming to Mac, paving the way for new levels of realism and detail in games and other apps. I'm guessing this is yet another API like Mantle/Vulkan that is also seated comfortably in the Apple walled garden and increases the development costs: awesome!

You probably won't use it yourself. You'll use Unity or UT4 which uses Metal under the hood.

> You'll use Unity or UT4 which uses Metal under the hood.

Why do I have to use those engines?

Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#14
post #5

> Metal is coming to Mac, paving the way for new levels of realism and detail in games and other apps. I'm guessing this is yet another API like Mantle/Vulkan that is also seated comfortably in the Apple walled garden and increases the development costs: awesome!

Most studios use middleware and there is zero support for OpenGL in game consoles anyway[0].

So it looks like Apple is saying goodbye to OpenGL, given that all their accelerated rendering has been moved over to Metal, at least from the keynote presentation.

[0] No sane studio ever bothered with PSGL on the PS3, the only console ever supporting an OpenGL variant.

Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#15

Welp... it looks like OS X is about to discover tiling window management lite. ;)

On a serious note: if you need automatic window tiling in OS X, you should check out Amethyst [0] (available via homebrew cask). I mention this everywhere I can because I spent a lot of time searching for and testing various window management software for OS X myself, and Amethyst is only easy, fully functional alternative I've found that works out of the box.

[0]: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#16
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably won't use it yourself. You'll use Unity or UT4 which uses Metal under the hood.

> You'll use Unity or UT4 which uses Metal under the hood. Why do I have to use those engines?

As anyone in the industry knows, either you make a game engine or a game.

Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#17
post #10

gotta love the adoption rate being percentage and not numbers. osx would show as a flat line...

Using numbers for adoption rate would make no sense at all. There would be no context for it. The comparison is how many installs are on the latest version. It would have to be X number out of Y number of installs in order to find out how many installs are running the same version. And then if you're doing X out of Y, you might as well normalize Y to 100, then you get a percent.

If you're looking to see how many of your users are on the latest version, percent is the only thing that makes any sense.

Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#18
post #14
post #5

> Metal is coming to Mac, paving the way for new levels of realism and detail in games and other apps. I'm guessing this is yet another API like Mantle/Vulkan that is also seated comfortably in the Apple walled garden and increases the development costs: awesome!

Most studios use middleware and there is zero support for OpenGL in game consoles anyway[0]. So it looks like Apple is saying goodbye to OpenGL, given that all their accelerated rendering has been moved over to Metal, at least from the keynote presentation. [0] No sane studio ever bothered with PSGL on the PS3, the only console ever supporting an OpenGL variant.

I think this benefits DirectX 12.

Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#19
post #8
post #5

> Metal is coming to Mac, paving the way for new levels of realism and detail in games and other apps. I'm guessing this is yet another API like Mantle/Vulkan that is also seated comfortably in the Apple walled garden and increases the development costs: awesome!

Yes, but unlike either of those it's in widespread production use (Mantle is still beta, Vulkan was just announced). It shipped last year on iOS 8 – this is just the expected next step of offering it on OS X as well: https://developer.apple.com/metal/

Right, that makes sense. However the desktop dev market is a completely different beast when compared to mobile - it's been a hard enough (and un-won) battle digging DX out. The chances of Apple pulling off what Khronos couldn't are slim - in my opinion.

If I were Apple the best I'd hope for is their mobile games porting over to OSX. However, with the added performance of desktop is Metal really needed? If it works on a tablet I'd say there's a fantastic chance it would work on desktop with mere OpenGL.

Re: Apple OS X El Capitan

#20
post #2

It looks like an incremental release. Not a bad idea considering how many bugs / issues Yosemite had. Hopefully, El Capitan fixes most of them.

Feels a lot like a Snow Leopard release which mostly optimized things and improved performance.
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