Viewing topic MacOS + Metal and Linux

Title: MacOS + Metal and Linux

Hal_Kado 21 Oct 2016

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With Apple unwilling to update OpenGL or implement Vulkan the future of mac gaming is going to have to rely on Metal. Feral is releasing Deus Ex on MacOS using Metal (sometime later this year after an upcoming update).

It made me wonder, do you think Metal will affect linux gaming at all? I would assume the developing for Mac and linux would have been a no brainer as they both would use OpenGL. But going forward it seems that dev's like Feral will need to split resources as they will be targeting Metal on Mac and Opengl/vulkan on linux. Is there any chance this adds costs? Would it make a dev rethink releasing for linux and prefer to target a potentially larger Mac audience? Or does Vulkan take over and Mac becomes the ugly stepchild no one wants to develop for?

Then again, I can't say I understand the dev process, maybe releasing for both Metal and Vulkan only adds minimal effort....

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PublicNuisance 21 Oct 2016

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Quoting: Hal_KadoWith Apple unwilling to update OpenGL or implement Vulkan the future of mac gaming is going to have to rely on Metal. Feral is releasing Deus Ex on MacOS using Metal (sometime later this year after an upcoming update).

It made me wonder, do you think Metal will affect linux gaming at all? I would assume the developing for Mac and linux would have been a no brainer as they both would use OpenGL. But going forward it seems that dev's like Feral will need to split resources as they will be targeting Metal on Mac and Opengl/vulkan on linux. Is there any chance this adds costs? Would it make a dev rethink releasing for linux and prefer to target a potentially larger Mac audience? Or does Vulkan take over and Mac becomes the ugly stepchild no one wants to develop for?

Then again, I can't say I understand the dev process, maybe releasing for both Metal and Vulkan only adds minimal effort....

I'm not worried. According to the Steam hardware survey only 12.93% of Mac users have a dedicated GPU. Over 35% of Linux users had a dedicated GPU. Metal may be able to help developers get their game working on Intel onboard graphics but it isn't magic. At the end of the day we have far more people with capable systems than Mac does. It is easier to code for better hardware. Just my opinion.

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m2mg2 21 Oct 2016

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Feral seems to be OK with it. We'll see about VP and Aspyr. Feral seems to have done a really good job with their indirectx system. They can move to Metal for MAC and still have a good system in place for Linux, it may be a little extra work but they already put a lot of work in to throw it away now. It is disappointing, Apple really screwed us here as developers could have gone with Vulkan and been able to hit Windows, Mac and Linux. Now they can't.

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sr_ls_boy 21 Oct 2016

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There a commercial translation layer. It's called moltenVK. That should help.

IMO, Apple made a bad business decision, especially when vukcan is used on Android.

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MaCroX95 21 Oct 2016

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When Mad Max was played by the Feral team confirmed that they are really interested in Vulkan which is awesome... so I think that this should not concern us and as other said eventhough there are more people using Steam on Mac than on Linux, Mac is not really a viable gaming platform because just because of their hardware... I am really wondering what kind of ratio is it in Feral's sales between the Mac and Linux... If they didn't have money from it they probably wouldn't keep bringing so many ports to us... and all these ports are getting better and better and there are more and more of them so Feral is definitely doing something great for our community :D

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Liam Squires-Hand 22 Oct 2016

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Considering Vulkan, Dx12 and Metal are all lower level, it shouldn't be as difficult as porting to OpenGL. We will just have to see what happens.

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MaCroX95 22 Oct 2016

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Quoting: liamdaweConsidering Vulkan, Dx12 and Metal are all lower level, it shouldn't be as difficult as porting to OpenGL. We will just have to see what happens.

This is true, but honestly I think that Feral finally managed to get their indirectx working very well and it is very unlikely that they already learned how to use Vulkan to its' full potential :D But we will see, it will be very soon :)

Oh does anyone of you guys know what does the depth charge icon on Feral's radar mean? I checked for that game and it says that it is some kind of a 1978 game xD This is probably Feral screwing around with us... which game do you expect to see (it's on radar even before than Deus EX) :)

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Mountain Man 22 Oct 2016

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If developers are smart, they'll just target Vulkan and leave it up to Apple to support it.

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Mountain Man 23 Oct 2016

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Quoting: Guest
Quoting: Mountain ManIf developers are smart, they'll just target Vulkan and leave it up to Apple to support it.
Most developers are not smart though, they are greedy. At least the bigger ones are anyway.
They will go where the money is, every time. :(

Being smart and greedy are not mutually exclusive. Making your game playable on the most systems is the best way to maximize profits.

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MaCroX95 23 Oct 2016

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Quoting: Mountain Man
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: Mountain ManIf developers are smart, they'll just target Vulkan and leave it up to Apple to support it.
Most developers are not smart though, they are greedy. At least the bigger ones are anyway.
They will go where the money is, every time. :(
Being smart and greedy are not mutually exclusive. Making your game playable on the most systems is to best way to maximize profits.

I agree, they could be both smart and greedy, providing all games on Vulkan to work on every OS possible and also make a lot of money like that... but would require them some learning curve for working with Vulkan... and this is the part where the problem occurs because they are too lazy to switch something that they are familiar with and that 90% of people are getting their product anyway without needing to learn something new...

However we should see more ports and better ports from Feral though because Vulkan is easier to port from DX12 than it is from DX11 to OpenGL... Hopefully we will also see more ports being done, eventhough Feral has gone completely mad this year with number of pors :D I hope that their trend will continue... but I don't like the fact that we hear nothing from Aspyr...

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Mountain Man 23 Oct 2016

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I've said before that if we had even just one more developer like Feral then Linux gaming would be in great shape.

I'd love it if they update their older releases to support Vulkan, but that's probably unlikely.

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