Apple Announces A New 3D API, OpenGL Competitor: Metal

[jimbohale]

I am floored by most of these comments. Really? You think this is a vendor lock in attempt? Let me tell you what, Apple *ALREADY* has complete vendor lock-in on their phones, this isn't that. This is just to help their share of the phone market. Nobody loses anything from them doing this. It's for Apple, by Apple, in Apple's territory (iOS), targeting Apple's customers. That's it. It's not going to bring anyone who uses OpenGL outside of iOS, and it isn't going to prevent anyone from using OpenGL anywhere else. It might even be a stop-gap until OpenGL 5 comes out and proves itself, who knows.

Additionally, don't be surprised if Apple open sources it. They've open sourced other things in the past and don't seem to have a problem with it. I don't even think it's going to be on OS X.

[rice_nine]

Now that AMD (Mantle), Microsoft (D3D12) and Apple (Metal) have their new "better than OpenGL" APIs announced, I'm wondering what Nvidia and Google will come up with.

Mandate, Moodle, Noodle, NaNdro, Middle, Meta, More Better

[dee.]

Moodle,

That's already a thing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

[DMJC]

How I see it.

I see a LOT of AMD Users being very butthurt over AMD's poor quality engineering team. Open source drivers are getting there and the performance is coming with the engineering. But NVIDIA has always had good OpenGL support and it's fast. Maybe people should stop blaming OpenGL and start blaming their crap GPU vendor. Intel has never been into making hard-core GPU chips. But they are actually making pretty reasonable progress making decent entry level cards. AMD has had years to get this stuff right, and doesn't hire anywhere near enough people to get this job done. It's time to stop launching 50 different API's and start pressuring AMD to put real resources into getting the job done right. I know this will come off as trolling to a lot of people. But come on, they've had more than a decade to get GL support correct. Intel gets it done first try. They just aren't making super fast GPUs. AMD obviously has a software engineering resourcing problem. I think Apple's metal is their latest attempt to make up for AMD's engineering shortcomings, else it's just Apple's way to avoid porting any legacy API code to iOS/Mac OSX.

[GreatEmerald]

Sure, let's go back to MS-DOS era where game developers had to ship THEIR drivers for the "most used hardware"

That sounds about how Mantle works.

Aras Pranckevicius from Unity said adding Metal support was the fastest API port they've ever done.

Oh hey, a fellow Lithuanian, working on Unity3D. Cool. Also I saw yesterday that he was excited for ASTC just as much. Well, for Unity3D any innovation is good.

[przemoli]

That sounds about how Mantle works.



Oh hey, a fellow Lithuanian, working on Unity3D. Cool. Also I saw yesterday that he was excited for ASTC just as much. Well, for Unity3D any innovation is good.

"ASTC" is API agnostic. Its GPU vendor agnostic (due to royality-free nature)...

And its good....

So good even MS want to include it in DX12 related feature level. (DX Y.Z now designate api, features supported are different thing...)
Apple will follow suite. If not now (duno if A7 support that), then in next iteration.

[rice_nine]

That's already a thing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

Yeah I think I heard of that, oops. Also I must be mental because I forgot Mental.

[blackiwid]

Both use OpenGL. Nvidia is heavily invested in OGL and has proven that it doesn't have the overhead AMD/Microsoft claim it has if used properly(e.g, arb_buffer_storage with persistent mapping)

sorry but thats a urban myth, they only have proven that they have slightly less overhead with a newer opengl version, but compared to mantle they see only backlights. Or their are just no real world game benchmarks. So they proofed at least nothing really.

Nvidia has a strong troll-like marketing, but they did not prove shit. And the real problem of opengl is not speed but the api, it has a reason that in no real world game this big big advantages their opengl verison seems to have dont exist, while there are realworld mantle games.

I think one possible way to go would be to deprecate opengl (at least for gaming) and focus hard on opengl es (maybe I understand this wrong but isnt opengl es, like a new version of opengl without all that backward compatibility).

That would make the codebase smaller and more managable. I think it will happen anyway because most arm socks only support new features over es opengl support is then mostly at max 2.0 and a seperate thing.

Maybe that could improve the situation enough that its good enough + maybe some more forward-thinking desitions of khronos and focusung less on some companies that build some stupid business applications with other needs who 99% of all users in the world dont have any advantage.

Or at least give a good for gaming usable base api and put only the non-game-shit into extentions.

[GreatEmerald]

"ASTC" is API agnostic. Its GPU vendor agnostic (due to royality-free nature)...

And its good....

Of course, I'm not questioning that. My comment was more to say that Unity3D folks are excitable.

[maokei]

after Steve Jobs dead apple loose their mine wth things, first was their maps software, now this? who next? they will put amd cpu in their mac laptops? lol

Imagine and arm-based macbook air running on their own armchip.