Metal?

Community Forums/Monkey2 Talk/Metal?

Raph(Posted 2015) [#1]
Watching the Apple WWDC, and it occurred to me to ask whether Metal factors into the plans.


Shagwana(Posted 2015) [#2]
Vulkan would be a better choice (when its released)


taumel(Posted 2015) [#3]
Depends on the platform? Apple is behind Metal, it's available right now, so ...


Raph(Posted 2015) [#4]
Looks to me like Apple is all in on Metal for desktop and iOS, so it might imply support for both. That seems to be what the major engines (e.g., Unreal) are doing.


taumel(Posted 2015) [#5]
El Capitan! :O)


EdzUp(Posted 2015) [#6]
OpenGL will live on much like DirectX etc. On the whole of it I can't see Metal replacing it unless Apple makes sure OpenGL doesn't work properly but that would do more harm than good.


taumel(Posted 2015) [#7]
This all comes down to availability and user experience. Currently Apple is all into Metal, on OS X and iOS, you'll get it for free (as long as you fulfill the hardware requirements), it offers real world benefits. Due to that Middleware devs are interested in boosting their stuff and reducing workarounds, they'll adopt it quickly. So, it doesn't matter a lot if you're a dev or consumer, at some point you'll use it. Apple likes having control, with Metal they have full control, plus it's available right now. It will be interesting to see how/when Vulkan will show up for Apple's platforms.


dawlane(Posted 2015) [#8]
Something tells me that we could be hearing law suits between Apple and the rest of the Khronos Group at some point. Some thing reminiscent of the Rambus fiasco.


Nobuyuki(Posted 2015) [#9]
What makes you think that? Apple is on the Khronos group's "promoters" list (which they consider their analogue to a board of directors) -- I guess maybe they'd be going against some other obligation?

In any case, I personally think Vulkan is much more important than Metal, seeing as how the latter sounds like it will be limited to Apple systems. Being able to precompile shaders, as well as having a specification for them to abstract the language from the code run on the target GPU theoretically would allow something like a direct Monkey shader language / specification to exist, should Vulkan be adopted....

I know for a fact that reduz is looking into Vulkan for the next iteration of Godot, although in the past, large public Godot releases used to be somewhere between valve time and duke nukem forever....


dawlane(Posted 2015) [#10]
@Nobuyuki: When it comes to Apple and any IP that they lay claim too. I am always skeptical. They did try to take a Mexican telecommunications provider iFone to court even though the iFone name was registered in Mexico long before the Apple iPhone ever hit the market. This debacle had been going on since 2009. In the end it was resolved by the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI), though apparently this ruling doesn't mean that its over from what I can gather by this article and the one that it's based on.
I now realize why Apple hardware is always on the steep side. It's nothing to do with the development and manufacturing. It's all the law suits that the keep making against various companies.

I have been playing around with Godot. It's nice idea but I think that they need to fix the HTML target. And I completely for got the scons build system. If I had remember, I would have suggested that Mark take a look at and implement something along the same lines for use with MX2.