Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X

I have never seen such huge difference. I'm playing and making games and most of them run 10% faster on Windows at most, and this is due to graphics driver.

However, there is one thing that is a major difference: the system timer. Windows sleep() call has a granularity of 10ms, while OSX one has 1ms. So, if you (or your game library) is using sleep to return unspent CPU time to OS, it's easy to write the code that would run fast on one OS and very slow on the other.

Most developers treat OSX version as a checkbox on their "required features list" and only care whether the game works or not when porting. They do not want to spend time looking at the intricacies of OSX and just tell you that it's graphics driver's fault.

I develop games on Linux and OSX and later port to Windows before releasing (because that's where the players are), so I have to write specific code for Windows to make sure it runs faster. For example, my latest Steam game was really lagging and slow on Windows until I figured out the timer problem I wrote about above.

Other developers do it the other way around, and OSX performance isn't top priority.

OpenGL is not the same everywhere even on the same GPU.

Every driver can negotiate its capabilities with the client app.

Apple has a software renderer that takes hold if client ask for an extension the gpu doesn't have, you have to ask a render surface in a specific way to get an error back when you ask ans unsupported feature.

At least that was the case when I last worked on a OSX app.

edit:

found some reference from the curious https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Graphi...

"Since the OpenGL framework normally provides a software renderer as a fallback in addition to whatever hardware renderer it chooses, you need to prevent OpenGL from choosing the software renderer as an option."

also note that 1 this might not be the banished problem and 2 this may be an outdated document

He is extremely productive, to be fair - "Shining Rock Software" is only him, the entire game, pretty successful on Steam, is just coded and maintained by him.

If you have written your game with a good api layer that shield you from platform specificity, I can't imagine why it would take that long to port... It's mostly SMOP

It should be something elementary the author still hasn't implemented properly during his porting actions. He says that he has "specific startup code" in "two different sets of the same GL code" in "copy-pasted-slightly-edited" form and that he "started writing things specific to OSX. Memory management, file I/O, timers, date handling, threading, etc."

Basically, there's a lot that could possibly go wrong during his first days of porting, and after all that he just saw "the title screen" and observes 1 FPS rendering. So it can be anything, it's too early to know, I hope the author posts later what was missing.

The existing OSX drivers are surely good enough for games, so it's the problem of the use and surely not the case that "the platform doesn't allow" or the "drivers."

Also note that it's not about DirectX vs OpenGL. He has OpenGL on Windows too (see the first paragraph here for the quote).