Dan_Dilger

wizard69 said:

By the way I must point out that this article is screwed as far as accuracy goes.   Metal and Vulkan are ver similar and derived from the same basic infrastructure.   As such Vulkan is as good or even better than Metal in the role it fills.   That is just one problem with this DED article that needs to be pointed out, too many take these articles book, line and sinker.   

Specifically what is your issue? The article does not say Vulkan fails to fill a role. It says Metal 2 is increasingly focusing on compute tasks, while Vulcan is aimed at graphics. That’s not incorrect. 

cat52 said:

sflocal said:

These politicians are only making a ruckus to ensure their re-election.  Nothing more.

I bet the protestors in HK would beg to differ.

While politicians do like to grandstand regarding all sorts of trivial matters, this is one example where speaking out can make a difference. So if Apple decides to swallow its moral compass, there is no harm in others reminding them to do the right thing. And if you really would like to see China's govt topple, then remaining silent and preserving the status quo isn't going to get it done.

What nobody really mentions is that HKMap also exists as a web app, and that nobody depends on Apple having the "courage" or whatever to keep hosting this in the App Store. Also, the delisting has no effect on users who already downloaded the app. This is purely virtue signaling by politicians who are in no way capable to do anything about it, and who are also doing very little to address real problems right here in the USA.

davgreg said:

So the great unanswered question is will there be a Mac Pro available for me to purchase before January 1, 2020?

On the consumer end of the Mac line I expect to see Apple developed GPUs in the not too distant future. If they ever decide to move the Mac to ARM, that would just about be a requirement. Note that Microsoft is preparing to ship an ARM based Tablet running Windows and this time it is being positioned above the Intel version.

Apple was using PowerVR, and now its own similar TBDR "Apple GPU" in mobile devices primarily because that approach is so much more efficient. It's not clear if there would be an advantage to scaling up its own Ax GPU to try to replace AMD or Intel silicon, even in its own notebooks. Moving from Intel to ARM might make some sense if Intel keeps failing to deliver big advances and its CPU prices remain high. That wouldn't require Apple to also jump to using its own GPU though. Instead, its possible that it could move to an ARM-based Mac that uses a fast third party GPU or two to make up any difference in speed, say, delegating more of the UI experience to the GPU.

Apple is already bring some core Ax functionality to Macs in the form of the T2 chip, and certainly learning from that. And the Afterburner product shows it has plans to tackle specific needs with a custom silicon solution. So it could begin adding more and more of these extra processors to Macs until the Intel CPU is increasingly less important.  

dysamoria said:

corrections said:

First, Apple "actually" started courting games for Mac OS X in 2001. These engines have been on the Mac for many years. So what's new is development making its way to the Mac. And the quotes, while certainly only words, do indicate that is happening.  

The quote from Unity literally states it "will give creators everything they need to create the next smash-hit game, augmented reality experience or award-winning animated feature"

Epic says its "Unreal Engine on the new Mac Pro takes advantage of its incredible graphics performance to deliver amazing visual quality, and will enable workflows that were never possible before on a Mac. We can't wait to see how the new Mac Pro enhances our customers' limitless creativity in cinematic production, visualization, games and more."

Pretty clear they are not talking about playing games on Mac Pro hardware. OF course, games being optimized for DirectX is the reason why games would play better on Windows than any other platform. So the goal and the incentive are both obvious to Apple. It's noteworthy that Apple is drawing attention to gaming, given that its priority has been pro creative apps. 

I see your bolded text, I’m just not seeing any explicit statements that the entire game development pipeline is available on Mac OS. I see a lot of “forward looking statements” with words like “will give” and “will enable”... I’ve been down that path with platforms before. It doesn’t mean the pipeline is there NOW. If you have more explicit statements of fact about the development pipeline on Mac OS for non-mobile gaming, I’m all eyes.

Yes, it IS noteworthy that Apple is drawing attention to gaming, and that’s why I posted my original comments. It caught my attention, especially in context to the Mac Pro, which is the only machine Apple “will be offering” that can match a desktop PC for sustained performance. If all they’re talking about is accelerating development for mobile games, then I’d like to know that for a fact. I don’t care about mobile gaming, personally. I should have specified that in my original comment.

You said that with "words like 'will give' and 'will enable'" ... "It doesn’t mean the pipeline is there NOW,"

No, what it pretty clearly means is that these developers wrote this in June about the new Mac Pro, which wasn't set to be delivered until the fall. 

It sounds reasonable that the first release of Metal dev tools for Mac Pro may not be equal to the "entire game development pipeline," but it really doesn't matter. That fact that so many major developers are investing in Metal means Apple has done years of outreach. Apple itself only just now released Metal optimized Final Cut X. Having anything to report this early is really something.

Compare Catalyst iPad apps brought to the Mac: Apple had three basic ones, now has an expanding set of its own apps (like Podcasts, Reminders, Find My) that are hard to tell apart form App Kit Mac titles. Third parties are bringing over apps, including Twitter. Catalina just shipped! It's still beta-ish itself right now.

Compare how quickly Google or Microsoft have been able to roll out entirely new initiatives and get developers lined up behind them. It's a lot of work.

You can bitch with Mark Gurman and his ridiculous Bloomberg naysaying about how Apple is top down incompetent, but you are not going to look very smart in the hindsight of a couple years. 

wizard69 said:

Wow another excessively wordy article that fails miserably.  Apple has about a 0% chance of making Metal an industry standard.  A Mac standard yes, industry no.   Vulkan is what the industry is moving to and that has a lot to do with being standardized.    It should be noted that Metal and Vulkan are very similar so supporting Metal is far easier from a Vulkan base.  

These articles are beginning to remind me of  some of the conspiracy videos on YouTube.  You know when the producer throws a bunch of facts at you and then try’s to link everything together to support his vision.   The conclusion though has nothing to do with the facts., rather the facts just obscure a wild ass guess.  Sometimes it isn’t even a guess but a fabrication bring views to a channel.   

One only needs to get in the loop with developers to realize that the only cross platform 3D solution taken seriously these days is Vulkan.  

Perhaps you should write for the Onion? Apple made Metal an industry standard by announcing it, because Apple is the majority of the mobile market. Does something make you think Metal needs to be ported to Windows or something? I don't follow your logic. As the article notes, Metal is Apple's proprietary platform, and it is not finding it hard to line up development support for it. 

By your logic here, CUDA isn't platform because it doesn't run on GPUs from Intel, AMD, Mali, Adreno, etc. That doesn't make any sense. 

And Vulkan has no chance at being more commercially meaningful than Metal. It's some thrown away software that went open because it had no value otherwise. It's like Java on the desktop, or OpenSymbian or VP9. 

The games using Metal are significant. The games that are written to Vulkan to run on Metal are hobbyist play with 2000 era id software. Again, take a look at that disagreement pyramid. You're ripping up a cliche of a Youtube strawman, not addressing anything written in the article.